


Empty Gold

by failsafe



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Development, Complicated Relationships, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-05-25 04:26:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6180148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of the War, Artoria finds herself in the company of enemies. Gilgamesh, on the other hand, believes he is in the company of friends. The aftermath of any tragedy is what you make of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

 

She would never try to fight if the Holy Grail was to his back. The two possible objects of her desire, both before her – how could she resist?

This was the determination he had reached before Saber ever made her way to the grand music hall. All of it holds true, and he can see the raw thought playing out in her eyes. She has no choice, but he delights in seeing her decide.

Then, her golden sword shines brighter than his armor, brighter than the golden pools that bare too many Noble Phantasms to count.

“N—No!”

This is beyond the realm of anything she would do. He knows her – his bride to be. She will not destroy the Holy Grail in order to have some chance to resist his decision.

She cries out, as much lion as woman. She is angry and sounds as if she is in pain. The sound sears into his mind, and he feels cornered as if she is a lion. For a moment, all he can do is stare.

She seems to be resisting something, but he does not see how she can dispel her own attack without letting the deadly, beautiful light go free. Her small frame trembles as she cries out again, this time in words. Words not for him. He frowns, hardly able to hear them except for this.

He still has more weapons than she can hope to deflect. He can release them all, a catastrophe beyond recovery for her. He can kill her.

He does not want to do this.

Then, he understands. The third party who had entered the room, unnoticed by him, is her Master. Her Master is the cause of this, using his Command Seals to exact his will over her. Gilgamesh grits his teeth, ready to call down judgment upon this man for attempting to ruin his wedding.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her. The golden pools of light respond to his will, ready to turn upon the man, the mongrel. The man lifts his hand, another Command Seal carved there – red, glaring, and treacherous. Gilgamesh understands what he means to do and he has a single choice.

He can rain his treasures upon this mongrel and destroy him, trusting their aim to hold true through the perfect beam of light that he has seen issue from Saber's glorious sword before. Or, he can set aside his weapons and do something not considered before. Dozens of the little gates close, drawing the treasures they display safely back inside, protected from the destruction the mongrel above calls down.

Saber's blade swings down, and Gilgamesh has no choice but to dodge it. Only, he has not surrendered. The only counterattack deemed worthy of her at this point flies outward with a precise, familiar movement of his wrist as he throws himself aside. The weight of it pulls true in his hand – this weapon, more valuable than most of his weapons – this precious tool, bearing the name of his one and only friend, _Enkidu_.


	2. Bitter Bitumen

The sky is dark and blanketed with swollen, angry clouds.   
  
Beneath them, the color of blood – the sky and the ground alike, dirtied with mud made from death.  
  
The clouds above her will never burst, never pour down upon the ground something cleaner than the spilled blood of _everyone_ around her. She knows this because she has been here before, again and again. Always and always, returned from the end of time, she finds herself in this moment.   
  
Words here fall on no ears but her own. Every plea and supplication falls into nothing just beyond her lips. Every cry and scream and promise meets air that is too still, too empty, even though the wind howls around her. Such is the reality of every battlefield when the war has been lost, of _this_ battlefield – the battlefield where she will remain, caught in this last moment of living and first moment of dying, until she attains the Holy Grail.   
  
Something she knows with absolute, rattling certainty is: it must finally be different. The next time she is loosed from the bonds that hold her here, released into another contract and obligation, she will not drive toward her people's salvation as their king. She cannot, knowing that she never knew how to lead them at all. She never knew them, never knew them, never knew them...  
  
When the Holy Grail War begins again, it will be different. She will make it so. Her last struggle as King Artoria Pendragon will be to end her own reign forever. Once and for all time, as it should be.   
  
“ _One day, I will claim the Holy Grail. It was not I... who should have been king...”_  
  
There is nothing more to say when she has reached her resolve. Her resolve is a flaw, a fatal one, which she believes will never leave her. But who can know what will happen when, at last, it is over? She does not know what she will be when she is no longer the King of Britain, the King of Knights.  
  
The shelter of closed eyes does nothing to shield her from the stench, the stale memory, the ever-present reality of the smell of blood, of death, circling around her like carrion birds. She must be still, wait here for the summons to come again. She thinks she could wail and mourn for each of the dead and still not have enough cries left in her throat to fill up the time. She could curse or she could pray, but she does neither.   
  
It is frustratingly involuntary when her body jerks and she draws in a deep breath to fill her chest with air it aches for, even where time, life, and death are meaningless. Breathing only seems to invite more sobs for knights whom her apology will not help nor ever reach. Nevertheless it seizes upon her, the will to try to tell them she is sorry. She must try, knowing that it will never touch them. It will never reach their hearts, as they had not been able to reach hers. Before she exhales...   
  
Above her. The dazzling fade of a flood of golden light. The height of the ceiling above seems endless, and for a moment it seems as though nothing could ever interrupt the harmonic echo that reverberates up through rows of empty seats. The moment her vision comes into blinking, dampened focus, the high ceiling is replaced by the infinite height of the sky. The hall is crumbling around her, and all she knows is that she should be gone.   
  
The world rattles, and yet it cannot pull her fading form apart. Pain sears through her from each of her injuries, many and considerable and most prominently in her thigh. She tries to fade, tries to die, but she cannot move. Her arms are still held downward, holding her sword in the form of its final swing.  
  
She knows that her Noble Phantasm has been demanded of her, used against her in the greatest act of treachery she has ever known. And yet, she cannot find the anger Lancelot had pleaded, faulted her for not having, gone mad for the want of it.   
  
Her arms are like those of a shimmering ghost. There is a ripple in the air that makes her blue dress look more like the surface of the sea, beneath them. She sees them clearly and begins to understand. They are the links of a chain, encircling her arms near her wrists. The tension pulls tight against her armor plating which itself seems to give way more than she can, reminding her of when Diarmuid Ua Duibhne had sliced through it with his Gáe Dearg.   
  
She has never dreamt while she has been stranded at Camlann before. There is no reason it should be any different now, nor any reason she should dream this were she to dream at all. This should be the dream, the dream to remain and the dream to fade away in the endless, momentary wait.   
  
Abruptly, the chain pulls at her body, causing her to slide closer to its source. Barely able to move but finding she can, at last, turn her head, she sees where the chain connects to a golden pool, suspended in the air above him. The confused anger within her develops a new core and she tries to think of something, anything she could do with the improbable strength she has left to escape it. Though it will destroy her, she knows where she belongs, where she is to wait until this battle is hers once more, and it is not here. The hill at Camlann is where she should be, where she will remain. Not in this place, not in this world Kiritsugu had turned his back on – on her, on Maiya, on Irisviel – and not in his _collection_ , wherever it resides.   
  
She no longer has the strength to call upon Excalibur. She should not be here at all – a Saber class Servant without a prana source or a Master. And yet she tries, closing her eyes and trying to focus all her remaining energy on reaching out – for anything – and reaching inward for anything left within her. First soundlessly and then with a metallic rattle, the chain is tugging her gauntlets, pulling upward towards the angled golden pool. Ornate fixture and crumbling wall plaster alike fall around her as she rises, dust briefly obscuring her vision as she weakly searches for him to demand release.   
  
“Archer!” she calls out, her voice so dry that she does not know if anyone can hear it.   
  
The change of angle allows her to see him, positioned somewhere beneath and beyond her in the crumbling hall. He appears unsteady, and yet somehow he is still relatively unscathed. Nothing she had ever been able to do had touched him, and now she finally has room to feel some part of that shame. His golden armor is obscured in a few places, for moments at a time, by chalky white dust that comes from the impending, progressing collapse, but the hard angle of his eyebrows certainly does not indicate even the slightest apprehension or urgency.   
  
“Saber,” he calls up to her in return, his voice itself a demand for calm and compliance. There are fewer golden pools surrounding him now, and he has all but stopped baring weapons. She cannot tell if it is voluntary or if they are vulnerable. His lips curve upward calmly, arms folded over his chest. “This is quite remarkable destruction you have caused, and of such a beautiful scene for the start of our happy and prosperous life. No matter, I know these things were beyond your control,” he says, a crinkle of bitter distaste coloring his expression.   
  
With her wrists pulled above her, she cannot use her sword and cannot think of any recourse in her desperately weakened – weakening – state. She glares at him as if she wishes her eyes could produce the swords her hands cannot. She cannot seem to die and is running out of time, nearly pulled all the way to the false golden ceiling, not far below the crumbling plaster, metal, and stone one above. Her stomach lurches, some part regret and another alarm as a large, mostly intact piece of the theatre's structure falls just a few long strides away from him. It is his size or better, but all he does is step a few paces ahead of it, closer to her.   
  
“I believe it may be best if we continue our exchange of vows somewhere away from here. I told you the Holy Grail was a dubious wish-granter. I shall prove far more faithful.”   
  
“Let me go at once!” she calls down to him with all the authority she can muster – through gritted, grinding teeth that gnash when she speaks.   
  
“You do not want that,” he calls up with a pause for a hearty chuckle. “It would hurt.”   
  
She notices that she cannot feel the tremors that visibly shake the entire structure, suspended entirely by chains proceeding from the gaps in the world that look like golden water, but she can clearly see when they worsen. There is a loud sound like a great roar of a wave from the sea. Then ceiling begins to fall much more quickly and in larger pieces, some the size of small rooms, coming down like rain.   
  
Tracking his movement on the floor below, she tries to make out what he intends to do, but he is too far away now, or else her eyes are finally fading. She hopes that is the case. She does not want to remain here.   
  
The pull on her body jerks and everything is faster. She looks up to see where she is going with no more chance of escape. The remaining, flat planes of golden light swirl toward one another, meeting and expanding into something directly in center and barely angled above her. It grows bigger and bigger until it is wide enough to accommodate the widest part of her skirts as if it knows their form before she touches it.   
  
Her hands are drawn through first. The gauntlets she wears protect her from all but the faintest sense of something touching her, tangible and faintly warm. She lowers her gaze instinctively as she is pulled through, the bright light and some resistance still left in her causing her to shut her eyes tight.   
  
She feels the magical doorway first when the light touches the top of her head. It floods sensation through her hair down to her scalp, like sunlight hitting from above. She anticipates some feeling like being burned, but every bare and cloth-covered trace of her skin feels as though she is standing in the glow of an early spring morning, the heat sinking to warm every chill and ache down to the bone.   
  
When her boots have been passed through the light, it is as if there were never anything her body might have moved through at all. Feeling her weight settle, she has no further instinctive hesitation at opening her eyes and, worse, no heaviness of death upon them. In fact, she must open her eyes because she realizes that her feet no longer feel the weight of the armor she had been covered by moments before. With the severity of her injuries, it gives her the too-light sense that her wounds might open wider, and years of battlefield instinct will not let her ignore it.   
  
The callouses along the bottom of her feet scuff against smoothed stone, coming away with the faint feel of dust along arches and between toes. It is not just her feet but her entire body is freed from the support and the weight of her armor. She is standing freely on a leg that still stings, still aches, but it has no trouble holding her up.   
  
Her hands try to make sense of what has happened as much as her eyes to. She looks all around, searching for a threat, for him, for any trace of the golden pools that might let her step through, back into the world she had wanted to leave again. When she decides that it is time to search herself, she finds herself clutching white linen that is wrapped around her body to cover her much more lightly and loosely than she is accustomed to.   
  
Impulse drives her to tug and pull at the garment until she can see her thigh, to the highest place where one of his weapons had pierced her. She finds a mark there, bloody around the edges but no longer bleeding as if it has healed in half-measure, stopped in time. She lets go of the clothing, accepting the reprieve even if she does not trust its source and begins urgently searching her surroundings. All around her, metal, glass, and earthen containers sit arranged along tables constructed of very dry but likely beautiful wood. Interspersed with them, there is a mortar and pestle and beside it something that looks like it must have come from the end of time. It is quite dark and there does not seem to be any sort of window apart from very small holes nearly at the ceiling – something to let air in for observers of the room's contents.   
  
One of the bowls is open to the air, and inside there is something nearly white and faintly reflective. It reminds her most of tallow. Her brow pulls down tightly as she reaches out for it, touching two of her fingers through it. It is much clearer than animal fat, and it feels a bit cool. She brushes her thumb through it and realizes that it spreads quite easily across the pads of her fingers. Considering the room, she realizes what its contents must be. She suddenly wipes her fingers against her linen garment. She does not know if it is medicine or poison, and she does not know if she wants either.   
  
The room is not small, but it is not impressive in its size either. At the corner, however, there is an open space – a doorway – that she moves to pass through. Again she finds contents that meet similar descriptions, and again, but each collection contained in each room seem to be somewhat different in nature from the last. Not far away, she comes to a room that is filled with larger pots and urns and vessels, hanging plants and herbs in every available space. One of the vessels at a far end of the fairly long chamber, she recognizes at first glance.   
  
As if her knowledge of him had not already suggested where she is, she knows with certainty now that she is in his _storehouse_. Storehouses – endless chambers that seem to be situated in some place and time of their own. She believes that she might hear the faint echo of life somewhere down below and beyond the gaps that allow her the air she passively breathes, but she does not know if it is real or imagined, ghostly or alive.   
  
As when she sits upon the hill at Camlann, she does not know how much time passes. She can move freely here, but after several of the chambers she finds a space to slide her back down against the wall, to sit on the floor, and to wait. She arranges the thin, wrapped skirt around her body so it tucks beneath her knees and bars her arms across them, not sure if she is patient, angry, or simply defeated. She does not know how to leave. The lack of an awareness of the prana that flows through a Servant when they are called into the War is at once familiar and foreboding makes her wonder if finally her fight is, again, at its end.   
  
The one small grace is that he has not joined her in this place to gloat his victory over her yet. She is not afraid of his return. Something in her will not allow her to be. She only dreads admitting defeat to a person like him and is only mildly surprised that this means she feels something like relief that he is still, somewhere, _alive_. Her relief is the same as cowardice in this case.   
  
Her hair falls down upon her shoulders with nothing to tie it back. Everything that belongs to her except herself has not been deemed worthy to enter here.  
  
She picks up a section and begins to run thumb and forefinger over it, one set and then the other, watching as she spins at the dull glint of her yellow hair. Yellow, nothing like the gold that glints in every corner of this place, and he is blind not to see that. She will not pity him for it, though.   
  
The light returns when she has stopped expecting it. Beneath her and behind, the wall and the floor give way – slowly and instantly – to the golden pool that is large enough to let her curled-small body fall through.   
  
Night air thick with an evil, thick-smelling smoke fills her lungs as as she gasps once more, anticipating more rigid tightness in her belly and limbs than ever comes. She had been high up, but when the golden pool appears again, it must not be so far from the ground. Her breath is taken when she falls onto her back, all the weight of her armor and her dress and the strange tangle of the chain returned. She draws another deep gasp for air, giving into the need, and finding her nostrils affronted still with the smell of something she cannot explain – a fire too big, a fire to consume the world, hell.   
  
Apparently back in the world, though it looks and seems nothing like it, she feels her entire form seem to give and flood with the loss of mana that should not have lingered this long. Then she feels the drift of mostly-dry, mud-caked rubble beneath her shift as he kneels beside, leaning over her.   
  
“I am sorry to keep you waiting,” he says. He looks different. His hair falls more heavily upon his head, obscuring nearly down to his eyes, casting a shade over the unnatural red. Something dark and thick snakes down along his skin – the side of his neck, from behind his ear, pooling at collarbone before sliding past, down and down, somehow leaving him clean without resistance. It appears black, brown, catching red light. Poisoned earth, blood, and the faintest glitter of golden magic. Small traces of it linger all over him from shoulder to shoulder, down his arms, but they shed like a sickly skin that has finished with his body. He no longer wears his armor, but it is difficult to wonder at that.   
  
Her eyes adjust and they begin to flit back and forth, first to either side of his bare shoulders out over a landscape that has flattened and turned jagged and red which billows up the dirty smoke she inhales every time she breathes.   
  
“I came to you first,” he continues, a hand planting down and finding a steady place. His arm goes rigid beside her shoulder as he leans upon it, chest as aligned with hers as it can be as he accommodates the bulk of her armor and dress. She looks down toward the bottom hem of her garment, searching out her escape once she has pushed him away. She will have to wrest free of the chain, but it seems loose, like there is no lock or tie in it at all. The lack of defense on his part does not go unnoticed, and she will not waste the chance now that it is the only thing left to her. “Who knows what difference that will make?” he chuckles.   
  
He finally seems to take interest in her search, head tilting in the edge of her vision.   
  
“My victorious Master,” he says, tone full of some wry mirth. He waits and her fingers twitch, searching for energy, for hilt, for strength. “... I should return to him, to celebrate. But I think some pacts, some bonds carry with them more weight than others. Wouldn't you agree, Saber?”   
  
She snaps her gaze and fixes it to his as though he has leveled some great insult at her. Hearing herself called ' _Saber_ ,' once more – as familiar as her true name – for the first time, she wants to demand being called something else. Once she has looked at him, she does not look away. She will not let him believe she is afraid, even now. Her fingers grasp at the shifting ruin beneath them, digging through debris.  
  
Almost a shallow comfort, when she exhales some of her corporeal weakness seems to return like a flood. She can feel so little now, something different from the pain or numbness she had known when her left hand had been disabled so early in a war that seems like a distant, strange dream now. Her right hand cannot find her blade, but perhaps it can find her place – lead the way back to where she ought to be, the place where he has snatched her away from returning to.   
  
She looks down in a moment of impulse, wondering if there is something she can do not to fight but to leave.   
  
“Do not be shy, Saber. You of all people on this Earth have so little cause to shy away from me,” he says, tone so smooth and low that it is as if he speaks to a child. She snarls but not for him. He has left her enough space between their bodies that her left hand suddenly reaches for her right, manually removing the gauntlet because strength is scarce now and she wants to make it count as she must. He chuckles as her fingers work, successfully but slowly. She feels the way her movements drag and pull as if she is hungry.   
  
“There will be time for everything, Saber,” he coaxes. His fingers come to press against her left gauntlet. Some of the substance that trickles from his form, leaving skin if it had never been touched by the muck, drips onto it. She feels some strange magic working at the integrity of her armor when she knows that magic typically cannot penetrate her defenses. “You are very weak for now. Be patient,” he says. “I must retrieve my Master, but first I have come to help you.”   
  
Her glare seeks out his face, his meaning.   
  
He shifts his weight from one arm to the other, lifting the hand he had leaned his weight upon. Then, he touches her. His palm is slick with a coating of the substance that seems to repel from his skin. It does not drain away fast enough to avoid contact with her skin – her neck, her throat, the space beneath her ear where his fingertip makes her feel her own beating heart.   
  
His thumb moves and she feels herself being painted with an almost ceremonial reverence.   
  
Her eyes go wide, panic strong enough to make them feel nearly sightless gripping her.   
  
“Do not fear it. Your King has already seen all the evils of this world, and I have emerged with new purpose, King of Knights. I would not save you if I thought them enough to crush your spirit. I thought you should see – after what it has given me.”   
  
Her hand tries one more time for her sword – for Excalibur, her sword bathed in light bright enough to shine through even this dark place – but her fingers are nearly without feeling, nearly faded. She knows the feeling and longs for it, the call and the pull back out of the physical world. She no longer has Master, a mission, or anything to claim. Her hand goes flat, then she's not certain what she is touching beneath it.   
  
His fingers are hot, burning with fever, above the layer of coagulated mud between them. It is not as though she has never felt these things before – touch, mud on her face, despair – but they don't fit together in the right way anymore. The mud on her face is not rubbed toward her eyes, does not cover her mouth or nose. She cannot taste it, and there is no effort to make her try. Not an act of war, but rather an act of diligence, he stays where he is and trails his hand slowly down one side of her neck.   
  
Another gasp for air that she slowly lets out. Her eyes are closed and she feels the furthest from Camlann that she has since that last day. There is no touch of prana beyond her own, no link between her, the world, and the place where she must wait to make it right again.   
  
The sensation of being made of something brighter and less than nothing starts to spread from fingers to palm to wrist. It moves upward from where she has been concentrating the most of the remaining, muddled energy that somehow keeps her enfleshed, trying to call her sword into her hand.   
  
Beneath her ear and running up her jaw, down her neck, she feels something different. Even as his hand stills, she feels the creeping sensation of the mud, this ceremonial coating of it over one side of her face. Beneath that, she feels blood rushing to the place as if she is injured and it means it means to pour from the wound.   
  
Heated blood leads to heated flesh, warmth warring with the sensation of fading, letting go. From her neck, from one side of her face to the other – all along her body – the feeling spreads.   
  
It spreads like poison, like disease, and like the life-saving heat of a fire in the middle of winter.   
  
The fingers she had thought reaching back toward Camlann begin to burn.   
  
The smell of smoke presses more sharply into her lungs as her chest begins to feel full, tight, and in much more desperate need of air. She stares past his shoulder, up toward a sky that is blacker than night. There are no stars, there is no moon. There is nothing but the emptiness the mud pours from, somewhere in the edge of her field of vision. She cannot move her head, cannot move her arms, can hardly do anything but drag in deep, labored breath.   
  
_There was a king who stood on that hill at Camlann._   
  
She is surprised at how nothing moves, not even the focus of her vision. The dark at the center of her eyes must seem as empty and endlessly hollow as the hole in the sky.  
_  
There was a king who fell on that hill at Camlann._   
  
Some weight strains and presses deep against ribs that feel every bruise and crushing pain. The weight is even and all around her, unforgiving and only as warm as she is. She feels covered in sweat, skin beneath the layers of cloth and armor as though it is on fire. The pressure reaches a stopping point as though it had thought to cut her in two and changed its mind. Something gives and cracks and the weight is gone.   
  
All the weight is gone.   
  
Her chest expands without the protection of the armor to which she is so accustomed. She feels more rooted to the ground, limbs free but very still.   
_  
To imagine that the person, the image, the King she remembers upon that hill is anyone but the girl lying here on the ground is a foolish dream. A little girl crying for her lost country? She is no different now that she was then. She was King and she is that King still. She makes the same choices over and over that lead her back to the place she cannot escape, never reaching salvation for herself or for her people._   
  
To imagine that there is another path for her to follow, another fate for King Arthur, than to lead her people up to the hill where glory, chivalry, and honor all die, is nothing but deluded fantasy.   
  
Finally, she blinks. The darkness that momentarily follows clears her focus of the smoke and empty night.   
_  
She has come to this place, from bloody hilltop to this filthy desolation, as King of Britain. As their hero. She has fought the War again, and again she has lost. Even if she has been a fool until now in how this war must be fought, in how this game must be played, she understands in this moment. Heeding the summons into the Holy Grail War, listening to its call, casts her as Heroic Spirit._   
_  
Far from that hill and far from this valley of death, there is another hill. On it, the wind blows sweet, cool, quiet, and full of promise. Full of hope. Sunlight shines down upon a little girl who wraps her hand around the hilt of the sword gleaming beneath the same light. It fits in her hand, and she can think of what days to come could bring. Starting to pull, she already thinks herself ready to lead her people to a time when every day the sun will feel so safe and warm, the wind so cool and alive. Her shoulder tenses and the sealed away tip of the sword rises to meet her. She carefully turns it, tip toward the sky rather than the ground. From that first breath, their fate had been decided. From that day, they had all been doomed._   
_  
Hero, whether she led them to ruin or to glory, to victory or to death. She knows how it ends, how it ended, and yet she returns each time she is called to fight again for the Holy Grail. If any ghosts remain at Camlann, she wonders how long it has been since they have tired of waiting for her to finally understand. How they must hate her, hate her, hate her..._   
  
Her skin is hot, burning with fever. She tries to clear her stinging eyes, looking right and left and around. Inside her chest, her heart seems to clench tight, then start up again with quick, hammering pace. It feels like waking from restless sleep, from dreams of loss and bloodshed, but there is no waking from the hell the world has become around them.   
  
Unlike the end awaiting her at Camlann, she is not alone here. The realization startles her and her eyes move to back to his face. He is peering down at her, weight leaning into his arm without tire. His fingers are pressed into a section of loose hair at the side of her face, knuckles barely curled. Her eyebrows crease as she looks him directly in his red, coyly half-lidded eyes. His lips turn upward at each corner.   
  
“Saber,” he says, tone warm, low, and dragging out. “I was beginning to worry...”   
  
She searches his face for any sign of the sarcasm she expects and starts to feel the heaviness of bitter betrayal settle into her. She cannot find any trace of hatred there, nor even any of deception. Finding bloodlust and venom, hunger and hatred with a will to consume – those things she would have understood. She would have had something to fight, whether she won or whether she lost. In him, she cannot find any of those things. He refuses to give them to her. He does not hate her, and it strikes as hard as any blow.  
  
As if knowing to prove this point, his fingers move through the hair they curl loosely within. He is touching her temple and tracing skin where she feels the fast, rushing pressure behind her heartbeat.   
  
Her lips part as if to give reply, but instead she turns her head away. Strands fall with a smooth, surprising gradualness against her cheek.   
  
“I see your bashfulness has not left you,” he comments.  
  
She fixes a glare back up at him to show her continued lack of fear.   
  
Drawn away from her hair, he seems to have found another handhold. Beneath her chin, against her throat, he begins to pull at something. Instantly, she understands why her armor giving way did not leave her naked. Irisviel had given her clothes. When she lifts her head a little to look down along her body, the portion of mud slips from her face as if it reveres her the way it revered him, leaving their skin dry and spotless.   
  
She cannot say the earth and ash beneath them have the same regard for the suit, but for now these garments made of simple, fine, perfectly ordinary fabrics are the only armor she has.   
  
“That's a very interesting trick,” he comments, tugging gently at the silk tie, just beneath its knot. His fingers slide along, responding to the shape of her jacket along its lapel. “It's disappointing,” he adds after a meaningful glance down her frame. “But interesting... There is ti—”  
  
She clears her throat audibly. She knows what she must say to him now. She pushes down to steady herself as she sits up. Meeting his eyes at a more even level, she does not break the contact as she speaks.   
  
“You have won, Archer,” she tells him. She must admit when she is defeated. She waits to make sure he shows some sign of hearing. She thinks his eyes widen slightly, making the harsh, unnatural strangeness at the pupils less apparent. “Victory in the Holy Grail War is yours,” she adds, but the words are not hers to say and taste bitter in her mouth.   
  
For a short time he is quiet. He regards her with the same mildly surprised expression. He searches her eyes in turn until finally he shakes his head and starts to slide into a crouch. He is smiling when he readies himself to stand.   
  
“Oh, that thing,” he says with some amused disdain. It feels like he means to resume his part of their earlier confrontation, but he looks away from her as he says it. “Such a wonderful prize,” he says, obviously surveying across the aftermath all around them. She notes that he sounds more weary than victorious. “And you have reminded me...” He sighs and takes a few steps forward, inhaling deeply as if he means to sense his goal that way. “I should go and retrieve my Master, the true victor of the Holy Grail War.”   
  
He looks back at her, reaching back to offer his hand to help her up. His movements are casual, easy, trusting – like those of a friend. At least, those of an ally.   
  
She does not move to take his hand at all. Her knees have drawn up toward her chest and she can still feel the burning, aching hollows of the wounds in her leg. They have not resumed pouring forth blood, but they are still very real, as are the other wounds she had carried with her. She digs gloved fingertips into the loose and unsettled earth.   
  
He waits for some time and gives up. When he meets her eyes instead of watching for her hand, she sees some shadow of disappointment there. He faces forward, drops his hand to his side, and continues in the direction he has chosen.   
  
“I trust you will stand when you are ready,” he says, frighteningly gentle as he has been since she had awakened to find him looking down at her. At least this time he sounds a little more bored than before.   
  
She is almost content to see him go. She is surprised that he walks away from her with such purpose. Her hands lace together over folded knees and she looks at them, testing their entwined fingers. She thinks of the Command Seals on the back of Emiya Kiritsugu's hand and how they are gone now. She has no sense of whether he lives or whether he has died. He is no Master to her anymore.   
  
She could not have imagined Archer's bond to his Master to be any stronger than hers.   
  
She remains seated until he is only a source of movement only a little closer than the jagged horizon. He has stopped and begun to work at the process of digging in the rubble. She waits and does not move, to help or to hinder him. She thinks of going somewhere far away from here, but there is nowhere she can go. She thinks of staying right here until she can try again – in vain – to accomplish her eternal task. The possibility seems as meaningless as its impossibility.   
  
In this fleshly body she now feels herself within – no more need of prana, a Master, summoning – she does not know if the opportunity will ever arise again. She is a hero, and without a war to fight for people she cannot save, she is without a purpose. And yet, she must move from this place.   
  
She rises to her feet and starts toward him, not knowing why except that she has no other place to go. When she has come close enough to see the effort and movement in his shoulders and down his back as he unearths what is clearly the body of a man, she has a question she thinks she might ask. What is his loyalty? What bond does he have with this man that would inspire him to save him when he does not care for those cut down all around them? Why does he yet call him Master when the War is finished and he has no need for him to supply him with mana? What good is it to save one man when everything around them is on fire?   
  
Perhaps she wants to know how it might have been different. Had the roles reversed, had they both been standing here in flesh and blood bodies with Kiritsugu having claimed the Holy Grail, if some miracle or curse had left her behind as it has now – perhaps she wonders how she and Kiritsugu might have fared. Would she have pulled him out of this destruction of his own making? When she had, would he have looked upon her as Servant still?   
  
She is angry with herself for wondering. By the time she reaches him, she is simply angry.   
  
She joins him in the small, excavated pit of his own making and hauls him back by the bend of his arm.   
  
He stumbles very slightly and turns around to face her. First he looks alarmed, then the offended expression starts to settle over his face. She interrupts it then with her shouting.   
  
“Archer,” she addresses him, formally but perhaps not without mockery, “ _why_ do you—”  
  
She gestures toward the man, covered with blood that has bloomed across his chest and trickled down his face. The blood is more striking than the dust, as if he needs no dirt or mud to make him shrouded in death. She recognizes his face immediately, but it takes her a moment to believe it. He appears dead, but after a long moment, he breathes. She falls silent, looking from Kotomine Kirei's face to that of his Servant. Looking upon her fellow king's face, disgust stokes within her like a fire. What this means fills her with rage, but with gritted teeth she backs away in something like fear.   
  
She turns and climbs a large jut of demolished concrete wall without shame, gaining high ground and some distance away from them. She slides down the other side and moves past it, but once she finds her balance on some exposed, twisted steel bars jutting from yet more destroyed objects that are beyond identifying, she is uncertain how to continue. She tries to dust clean the hopelessly ruined suit and looks across a broader landscape visible from where she stands, somewhere beyond a crest and toward a flatter plain of ruin. In the shadow of the small peak in the ruins, it is dark. She takes a deep breath, not minding the smoke. She still has nowhere to go.   
  
“Where am I?” Kotomine's voice asks after a time. She will not look back toward the sound of his voice, but she feels the nearby movement as Archer sits upon the crest. Any question she might have had for him seems answered for her.  
  
Archer draws his breath and begins to speak to him. He ignores her presence and she thinks she might walk away while he does.   
  
“You're a difficult man to look after,” he says, as if it were amusing. “Digging you from the rubble was quite troublesome.”  
  
“Gilgamesh, what happened?” Kirei asks.   
  
If there is a bond of trust between them, Artoria wonders if all who have ever trusted are bathed in the same disease that had rained down upon this unfortunate city.   
  
“Who cay say?” Archer muses. “The mud spit me out,” he explains. “I imagine it to be a message from heaven, that I should return to this age to rule the world.”   
  
She thinks that perhaps he had shifted his focus, that some part of it had been intended to draw some response out of her. She does not rise to meet any call or challenge. She has already conceded his victory, and to challenge him now about a world that she cannot save would be a foolish mockery of honor.   
  
If it brings her shame to hear him speak of ruling the world as he might rule, it is no more than she deserves. That doesn't stop her hands from clenching tight. She hears her gloves make a soft sound, leather on leather.   
  
“So you have achieved incarnation?” Kotomine pursues.   
  
She cannot tell if it is concern or mere curiosity at play in his voice. Without seeing everything, she isn't sure how to know. She never understood her people, never understood her Master, never understood anyone until it was too late. Why should Kotomine Kirei be any different?   
  
The thought that it is concern she hears causes tight clenching in her teeth to match the furious tension in her hands.   
  
“Infuriatingly enough,” Archer says. Infuriating, he says, and yet he has trapped her in this form, too. She cannot escape, and she is not sure that even ordinary death would free her. Worse, she cannot reconcile herself to an escape, should there be any that might present itself to her. All she can do now is stand and listen. “I can't believe we struggled over that thing as a wish-granter. This play remained a farce to the very end.”  
  
“I was shot...” Kotomine marvels, and she knows. _Kiritsugu._ That explains the blood. There had been a lot of it. So he had not chosen to let him live, which she knows must mean, hopes must mean... And yet there is no hope in the thought. The Grail is gone, destroyed by her own hand and blade, and Irisviel had been long gone with it. Artoria knows now, it is not her place to save others.   
  
“I have no heartbeat,” Kotomine comments, the admission to being a monster like breathing for this terrible man. “Did you somehow heal me, Gilgamesh?”   
  
Perhaps then it was curiosity rather than true concern. Believing this creature more capable of concern than she is, even now, disgusts her.   
  
“I couldn't say,” Archer says. She does not know if he lies, but she does know the truth that he had told her. He had come to her first, in some way _healed_ her of the final blow that would have carried her back to Camlann. Whether it is life or death that he has granted to her with the touch of the mud to her skin, she knows that Archer is playing some game with this man who has played games with the lives and deaths of so many in these past days. “To my eyes, you do seem dead. But we were connected by our pact,” he says. To many, it would have been an insult, but she does not know if these men have tuned their ears to hear them through their arrogance. “When I regained flesh within that ooze, perhaps you were trapped in some sort of nonsense of your own.”  
  
“You're saying it granted me life?” Kotomine asks, breath held with the first sign of reverence the man has seemed to have. She knows that it is trust and awe and those things that Archer desires for himself. She wonders if thy see that they are both bitter traitors to one another, or if they know such ideals at all for it to matter. Her hands are curled so tight into fists that it is causing her pain.   
  
She turns to look up at Archer, eyes falling at the midpoint of his spine and working their way up.   
  
“Archer, you owe him nothing!” she shouts with no concern for composure, only authority.   
  
She hears Kotomine make another sound of surprise. She supposes that her position was concealed, but the incompetence just adds another layer to her disdain for him. It is worse than disdain. It is hatred. Pure and bitter hatred.   
  
Archer looks back over his shoulder at her, down and right into her eyes. He moves his hand around to brace his posture.   
  
“You choose to speak,” he says. He sighs and starts to wear a slight smile that looks genuinely happy.   
  
“The woman—” Kotomine inquires to the front of Archer's makeshift throne before him.   
  
“Do not address her in such a manner,” Archer warns without looking around. “It is beneath her and perhaps above you to know her in such a way,” he says, keeping a tone of friendly conversation between them.   
  
“Archer, stop speaking such nonsense!” she demands of him, angry to the point of strain on her voice. “This man is no longer your Master, by whatever underhanded means he came to be. Your contract is broken and you are no longer his hero to command. Or has he become your ruler? Your King?”   
  
Archer narrows his eyes at her with something approaching the cold, bitter aggression that would make him an enemy much easier to comprehend. Behind her, she notices golden spots of light and looks around. There are only a few, but they are too high above her head. She looks up, gaze narrowed and focused to understand.   
  
They are faint, hardly called into existence, but each and every one of them is aimed at Kotomine Kirei.   
  
In the moment before they fade from the world again, she finds that for an instant something in her chest refuses to let her breathe. Her lips are parted, but there are no words for it.   
  
He remains almost inscrutable and it is like a cool, tempering wind over her anger.   
  
Archer snaps his fingers, merely for effect as he indicates where Kotomine stands.   
  
“It would be much more comfortable to have this discussion where we can all see each other,” he remarks, but he does not wait for adjustment or press the point. “Kirei and I have had an understanding that our interests and desires over the course of this War were best served together. He is... a friend,” Archer adds with a strange slip of his tongue.   
  
She had no intention of revealing her exact position to Kotomine Kirei or of looking upon his face as anything but a dead man, but she abruptly changes her mind. She feels some sense of claim over this conversation, and she will not grant its ownership to the man who has taken Irisviel von Einzbern's life. Even if it had been inevitable, perhaps her response is inevitable too.   
  
Another life she had not been able to save, but she can fight and kill for her, too.   
  
Even if Kiritsugu was right and there is no honor, no chivalry in her actions – she can do this for her.   
  
Artoria reveals herself, dressed in the clothes that a dead woman had chosen for her. She turns to the fixture of stone Archer has perched himself up and steadies her hands. It is large enough that she pulls herself up, finding no shame in vocalizing against the pain and discomfort tightening in her leg. She climbs and rises to her feet anyway, towering over the man and standing indifferent to the king beside her. She looks down upon Kotomine Kirei, not shying away from his dull and yet not quite dead eyes.   
  
“You're his Servant,” Kotomine says, those eyes widening just a little. He glances at Archer and his lips begin to turn, considering a smile but not managing anything that does not resemble madness. “She is still alive?! Does that mean...?”   
  
“Once more, I could not say,” Archer says. He sounds tired of this, but Artoria has not decided to speak to grant him entertainment. She will not look at him, will not stray her gaze from her intended target.   
  
She extends her hand in a familiar way. Her clothing does not change and she feels no added weight or protection from her familiar armor and battle dress. However, the familiar hilt of her sword is summoned to her hand with none of the trouble she had experienced before. She grips it expertly, her thumb's adjustment the closest thing to affection or a clean thought she has known since the first sour note of panic upon realizing that Irisviel had been taken. She understands her purpose now and her only recourse.   
  
“Kotomine Kirei,” she addresses him, as she knows she should when she is about to cut him down as an executioner more than a king. If he asks for her name, she will grant it, but it does not concern her otherwise. She has no intention of allowing him opportunity to honorably fight back or defend himself. He forfeited that right hours ago. “You will die where you stand for what has happened tonight.”   
  
Whether she is speaking of the wanton destruction or the apparent indifference toward it or about Irisviel alone, she realizes it does not matter.   
  
She feels a hand snake up the back of her ankle and grip just above it, slithering around to the inside. Her slacks fold slightly around her leg and she feels his hand's warmth, steady and still and in complete contrast with the pain that burns through wounded muscle. She does not simply lift her leg and kick because she wants to know how or why he dares to try and stop her. There is nothing to grant him the right, and he does it without providing for his own defense. Archer does not even have a scrap of cloth to deflect a blow, and she is tempted to send blade right through him. He is not the one she intends to kill, but she has no reason not to.   
  
“Saber,” Archer says. “Do not act so hastily. He _is_ my Master, and I have been trying to look after this man. It would be embarrassing for me to allow him to die so soon after our _shared victory_ if there was anything in my power to stop it.”   
  
“There is nothing in your power to prevent this man's death,” she assures him, nostrils flaring with her anger as she huffs like an animal ready to strike out at prey. Her heart beats true blood through her veins so fast that she can hear the beating like drums of war in her head. A glance at the blade that is as familiar as her arm shows its light to be diminished. It is crisscrossed with red, glowing runes that had not revealed themselves before. But it is Excalibur. She can think of no reason be alarmed that it might show more power, more potential when she has never thought herself in so great a need of a weapon before. “And I care nothing for your shame,” she adds, sidestepping and wresting her leg free of his grip without losing her balance.   
  
His hand gives way, but then he reaches out and tugs at the leg of her slacks like a lost child.   
  
“Let us hear him first. Any dead man has a right to his final words being heard by someone, does he not?” Archer asks with an almost pitying smile aimed down at Kirei.   
  
Another glance tells her that Kotomine does not understand his peril. It seems he is amused by it as he is amused by the destruction of all that is around him. She does not understand it, nor does she care to. Still, Archer asks.   
  
“We discussed the Grail's potential as a wish-granter, did we not, Saber?” Archer asks her first. She senses that he means to entwine her in some sense of co-conspiracy that he and his _Master_ do not share. It does not matter. “Kirei,” he says, shifting focus with ease and a slight leaning forward at his waist, “if the Grail truly grants the victor's wish, what you see is exactly what you most desired.”   
  
Archer gestures broadly to the landscape stretching nearly as far as any of them can see, the back of his arm coming into contact with her knee before he drops it away.  
  
Kotomine takes pause to observe, just as Archer instructs.   
  
“What?” he asks softly. Then the soft voice trickles into helpless, uncontrollable, pathetic, disgusting, cruel, deafening laughter. “What am I? What manner of evil? What manner of cruelty? This is my wish? This destruction and tragedy? This is my joy? Could something so twisted and corrupt truly have sprung from Kotomine Risei's seed? Impossible. It is impossible! Did my father sire a cur?”   
  
She cannot help but note that Kotomine chooses one of the words Archer uses to demean those of his _sheep_ he does not like. She glances at Archer, refusing to consider or bear the weight of her own confused interest. She looks, though, a deep furrow in her brow.   
  
Archer looks up at her with a nod and a smile that will not diminish.   
  
“Are you satisfied now, Kirei?”   
  
“No, not yet,” Kotomine replies, still regarding this as an ordinary conversation that will end with his having some conclusion and some hope of another. It disgusts her, fills her with more and more of the same red that colors her blade. “This isn't enough. Yes, it is true that my life of questions—”  
  
“Silence,” she growls down at him, the order just loud enough to cut through his mounting speech.   
  
She has his attention and some small expression of disappointment, of disdain, and a color of murder tinges his eyes. Perhaps he will fight back, but it will make no difference.   
  
Archer heaves another audible, dramatic sigh.   
  
“Saber, are you satisfied?” he asks.   
  
“No,” she answers him, only because there is no advantage in choosing not to do so. She leaps down, blade already making a valiant swing to try and cut down Kotomine Kirei where he stands.   
  
He is weakened from whatever shade of death has passed over him but not untrained. He avoids such an obvious, announced blow. He avoids her and prepares to parry with the long, thin blades that he wields between his fingers. He brandishes them so quickly that it seems to rival the appearance of magic, but his method of futile fighting does not change anything about the way she chooses to fight.   
  
Every blow is intended to disarm and to kill. There is no matching of skill, no respect, and no honor in staying on her feet and going after him with a renewed sense of vigor in each of her limbs. It is wild, and to an observer might not have seemed as elegant as the King of Knights ought to have been. With this style of fighting there is only one thought: _kill, kill, kill_.  
  
Excalibur catches his garment and his side, but the blow is rendered superficial by his sense of speed and timing. It is the only reason he is alive.   
  
“There will be no escape for you, monster!” she is driven into saying to him. “There will be no escape for the man who allowed no escape for her,” she snarls, explaining further and etching his death sentence even more deeply into whatever hardened thread remains of her conviction.   
  
He parries again, but he is tired and hurt. It is only a matter of moments. Yet, his gaze strays up toward Archer as if there might be some help coming from there.   
  
She does not afford Archer the same attention. She can only see the stray of his eyes as another opportunity to strike a fatal blow. She uses his distraction to knock his taller frame to the ground beneath her. Her foot pins his chest, crushing air from him with all the weight she can bear. He coughs and splutters and she feels no compassion for his struggle.   
  
“Kotomine Kirei,” she spits again, compulsive and filled with hate.   
  
There is a movement, far away and to the other side from where Archer observes their battle.   
  
She does not heed the distraction, but even in the face of death Kotomine seems more interested in it than in her. Another gasp comes from him, but it is soft and tinged with that rare, twisted reverence.   
  
“Emiya Kiritsugu,” he says, choked voice heralding and filled with sick longing.   
  
“You will die before—” she is already pronouncing, but hearing the name spoken again draws her gaze aside when she realizes it is not a lie or a trick. She does not feel any pull to him, no connection to his mana, no sense of his life force and whether or not he is dying. She is altogether more aware of the undeserved life she is trying to crush from Kotomine Kirei's lungs.   
  
“What's the matter, Saber?” Archer asks. “You have chosen to spare my Master?” he marvels.  
  
She steps backward, away from Kotomine. His chest heaves when her weight sets it free. She knows he is too weak to strike back against her without time to heal. She shows no fear as she turns to watch as Kiritsugu picks aimlessly through the rubble and wreckage. When Kotomine can manage to rise to his elbows, he turns bodily in Kiritsugu's direction and does the same. He coughs and his hand goes to tend his wounded side. The coughing leaves a trail of bloodied saliva between him and the ground, but he desperately watches after Kiritsugu. After a moment of this, he tries to get to his feet to no avail.   
  
Artoria stands with Archer to her back, Kotomine off to her side, and Kiritsugu a passable distance in front of her. She stands before them all, no longer the Servant she was. The breath her body now demands comes more deeply than she cares to allow. Letting her breath go, it shakes like someone staving off the deadly embrace of cold. She lowers her hands and lets one fall to her side. From the other, the weight of Excalibur disappears as she loses to will to keep it drawn.   
  
“Would your Master be displeased if you destroyed his great enemy? He yet lives, I see.” Archer pursues, lilting the words like a song. His voice moves behind her as if he may be moving from his imaginary throne, moving closer.   
  
“The Holy Grail War is finished,” she says, resolute. Every thought of honor and duty toward Kiritsugu has left her, left something else behind in its wake. Even in her hopeless search for Irisviel, even when she had seen his denial of everything he had believed, even as he had betrayed her, she had not seen or felt such an emptiness between them. She no longer sees someone despised, pitied, trusted, or hoped in. She no longer wants anything from him, nor would she obey any command he gave her if he asked. She does not think him capable of asking, of trusting, of even looking beyond the empty, desolate dust and ash beneath his feet. “And he is not my Master.”


	3. Dreary Daybreak

 

She moves forward before Gilgamesh reaches her. For a moment, he believes that she will run to the man who had been her Master after all. A glance down at the person lying in the filth beside him makes him believe he might understand this, were she to go to him, were she to require some further explanation of the outcome of this war. Even if it were to turn her blade against him, at least it would be something.

Rather than taking a path that might lead to her former Master, Saber simply finds more level ground, ascending just a little before turning another way. She leaves Gilgamesh's sight, perhaps only a little less directionless than the ruined man picking through the trash heap.

Gilgamesh is about to track her movements, to call out to her in gentle rebuke. She should not leave his sight so carelessly. Then, he catches movement in the corner of his eye. Pupils adjust to the darker space below, this landscape veined with blazing light and darkness. In the dark, down on the ground, Kirei moves to brace himself against his shoulders.

A smile hangs on his face, terrible and painted with bloody saliva. His eyes are wide with wild display of interest.

Gilgamesh shifts his bare feet on the disturbed earth beneath them, the angle of his body shifting to face Kirei. He lets go of a breath, drawing another only because he must. The air still smells of the aftermath, of rebellion against the heavens which, in due course, has rained down fire.

“Saber is still alive,” Kirei remarks, words as expectant as his eyes.

He looks upon Gilgamesh with something curious and hungry. If Gilgamesh were not completely certain of the contrary, he might believe he is being accused. Kirei does not move from the dirt he is sprawled within and barely shifts his position while he anticipates... something.

Gilgamesh notices first the faintest shuffle of weight, then the quiver that follows. Shoulders move involuntarily, trembling as if they mean to draw together in front of his body in a grotesque contortion. The movement speaks of weakness, depletion, but Kirei does not react.

Gilgamesh cannot bear to look upon him this way. There is an inescapable itch of disappointment he feels under the weight of such a gaze. One that could be deadly for Kirei if considered for too long, which would be a shameful waste of such a curious return to life. His hand reaches down, grasping the cool and dampened flesh of the man's left hand as he hauls Kirei to his feet. He lets it fall once more and examines his palm with a brief expression of displeasure. He is without anything to wipe away the touch of death from his fingertips.

“Now that you have seen what lies within your heart,” he says when he recovers any taste for conversation, “I hope you can understand that we cannot remain in this wasteland.”

He studies Kirei for any reaction. He sees a moment of searching reflected back into his eyes, but Kirei seems to sweep it aside in favor of a question.

“Why have you allowed her to live?” he asks. His tone has dipped lower, as if there might be some underlying thought to his gleeful survey of all the destruction he has helped bring down upon the world around him.

Gilgamesh considers his response and at once dismisses Kirei in favor of turning himself away to search for her.

“It was my desire that she not slip away so quickly,” he says, as much explanation for his current actions as those of his past. There had been a choice to make, and he had made it. What followed had not been of his making, but how the gods saw fit to bring down judgment on the world was not without value when taken into his hands. “And it would seem that this deplorable mud has its uses.”

“And so this mud has incarnated the _holy_ Servant of Emiya Kiritsugu,” Kirei says, a hint of dry mockery in his tone.

“You will not speak of her as such,” Gilgamesh orders, not turning to look back upon his face. He can imagine how it twists, a sad shadow of the obscene, but the thought does not hold his interest.

A longer moment of silence passes before he spots Saber, still retreating to some destination he cannot guess. There is a shuffling behind him and the sound of something tearing. He does not allow any curiosity until Kirei reappears at his side, his hand outstretched while clutching a length of red fabric. It looks rich and fine, burned and ruined, and it must have come from somewhere within the grand structure had had housed the Grail.

Gilgamesh narrows his eyes as he wraps the thing around his shoulders with a deliberate flourish.

“Make arrangements,” he tells Kirei with a brief glance at his eyes, hoping there is clarity of understanding in them. He has charged him with something that will give him the opportunity to retain some position, now that their circumstances have changed. It is the most lenient response he can offer, and any more careful judgment would take up valuable time. He climbs from the shallow grave and follows his chosen prize. “Surely your search for answers – or is it questions? – can wait while I retrieve what I have won.”

“Then, you wished for Saber?” Kirei asks, mirth and something dangerously close to disdain seeming present in his tone. Gilgamesh decides he need not mete out reprimand for every infraction such a man as Kirei has become commits. Better to consider him as a jester until his new curiosities have found their place in the scorched landscape.

“Perhaps,” Gilgamesh says as he braces himself at the mouth of the pit, “it is less about wishes and more about what we want.”

  


┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

  


It is less a concern of speed and more of distance as Gilgamesh sets out to capture Saber. She has had the advantage of several moments of purposeful forward movement while he lingered with Kirei. With this in mind, he adjusts the draped piece of fabric to curve around his shoulders a little tighter. He moves quickly, making long strides. He closes the gap between them – his legs are longer than hers – but he will not run to her.

There is no need.

When he is in speaking distance of her once more, another sound fills the air. It is an unpleasant wail that circles around its source like some vengeful spirit demanding reprieve. The sound is coming closer but is still a long way off. In his short time again walking the Earth, Gilgamesh has heard the sound before.

The thought that there is some end to this mass grave seems almost laughable. And yet, somewhere beyond its edge, the cries of emergency vehicles spring to life. They seem to come from more than one direction, their calls of alarm disjointed and disorganized to his ears. It is as if they are, one after the other, noticing that the world around them has caught fire – defenses destroyed, granaries burned, the lives of children extinguished – but have come too late to the battle.

Not a single ordinary person could have been left alive. It has only been the power of the contract between Servant and Master that has spared Kirei or Saber's defeated Master, and not completely.

Far above them, he hears an even more familiar sound – the quick whipping of air, the low hum of an inelegant, fast, and enclosed flying machine like one he had encountered before. He glances up to the smoky sky and does not catch sight of the movement. He might have admired their dedication, but what they mean to do with that thing, here and now, is beyond what he cares to speculate upon. He still has the urge to draw the fabric higher and tighter to his shoulders as a light seems to fix and trail along the ground from a point somewhere above the clouds.

He chooses to turn his gaze to the much more pleasant pursuit of Saber. The fine fabric that comes to elegant angles at her shoulders is swathed with a trace of soil that interrupts the glittering black reflection of the light of the reemerging moon.

“Saber,” he calls to her, his footsteps stilling where he stands as he fills with expectation of her reply. She does not turn or stop at once, so he tries again. “Where could you think to be going?” he asks, some trace of pity in his eyes if only she would be wise enough to look.

She does stop a few paces ahead of him, at last. She lifts her hand and he thinks she means to gesture with her speech, but for a moment more she stays silent. She appears to be looking down at her own gloved fingers.

“If—” she begins some thought, still facing away from him. Her fingers curl her hand into a fist, held close to her chest, as she pauses and turns toward him. She clears her throat, speaking more firmly. “If there is some end to this battlefield—”

Her eyes look less bright than he remembers them. They have taken on a murky shade that seems to speak of sickness. It is as if the embers that are everywhere have given up reflecting in them, giving up their essence to the color. By the look in them, he thinks any fire might have been afraid to shine back.

“There is,” Gilgamesh asserts, interrupting because it disturbs him that she has not noticed the wailing sounds singing at a closing distance, the sound of the flying machine above them.

“—then I should find it,” she finishes tersely.

“And what will you do when you arrive?” Gilgamesh asks, holding his shawl a little tighter to himself. His restlessness might otherwise lead him to fold his arms, to let the shawl fall away. Her shyness would not prove so amusing while it carries with it this particular wearisome cloud.

“That does not matter,” Saber insists. She looks somewhere past his shoulder, and the distance of her gaze seems a little staggering to behold. She nods forward to indicate what lays behind him. “You have won your war, and I am leaving your land until I am called upon again to fight for my people.”

Gilgamesh considers her – her visage, her stance, and the faint twitching of her fingers. Her face is one of cool determination, her jaw set. Only when she breathes out, some of the tension leaves them, making them look as if they are slipping from their natural height to a slump that resembles defeat.

“And so this is your exile from the civilized world?” Gilgamesh observes. His tone carries with it the mournful reverence the notion deserves. He recalls recoiling from death. He knows the desire – one that constricts across the chest – to rend the world with his teeth. He knows what comes when the path ends, when he has nowhere to go but back home. He starts to bare his teeth, not to bite but to grin.

“There is nothing civilized about what you have wrought here today!” Saber says, the outrage seeming to come from all around her, drawn in with the air she breathes.

“What I have wrought?” he scoffs back at her. No matter what other motives he has, he can't help it. “Glorious Saber, this,” he says, pausing to gesture back behind his shoulder with gently curved fingers and an open palm, “is what you have wrought. Or, rather, what these men have wrought around you with their own hands. Their words. His words... daring to command a king.”

Lowering his hand, each word brings him a little closer to her, a smile never falling from his lips. The weight upon her shoulders is visible. The difference in her eyes too, a little eerie and unfamiliar. It is difficult to tell if it is wild or dead, and it is not entirely pleasant. The dullness in her gaze as she does not look away from him is the only part of her that isn't entirely beautiful now. And yet he can see the significance of all of these things – the heaviness of them.

She carries all the world, all this ruin and death, all this suffering and evil, on her shoulders. She imagines herself not only king but savior of all these people. The dream of it is too much, too heavy for her shoulders to carry. The dream of it is crushing her beneath its weight. And she is never more beautiful than that.

He is close enough to reach out for her when he speaks again – more softly this time.

“You can blame me,” he says, with a wry and lilting tone of promise. A promise that is conditional but intended to persuade. He begins to lift his open palm once more, ready to brush his hand against her cheek, to cradle her tense jaw. “You can mistake the power that has granted us this bodily form for more than it is. Only, I think you misunderstand _who_ has been your enemy.”

She takes a step backward with narrowing eyes. With one hand, he continues to reach out for her face, her neck, and her delicate shoulder that is so weighed down. The other hand beckons for her body, to draw her back in by her waist.

“Whatever desperate cry from the world has allowed me to take up this earthly life and to grant you the same, with me you can be sure that no one will ever betray you as he did. Never again,” he assures her – the same promise he had tried to make before, when it had seemed much more urgent. Now they have all the time she needs to make the right decision, and no need of weapons.

Her skin is hot to the touch. Hot to the touch in a way that is familiar and softens his heart to the point of pain. He notices the way his own skin has cooled with the rush of cold night air that tries in vain to calm the fires around them, and he knows that she will survive.

He can feel the shape of her jaw settle into the softest part of his palm and his thumb drags along her cheek. He means to soothe her from this fever, to lead her from this night. In the day that is to come, her fever will break and having seen all the evils of this world, she will endure them.

He feels her jaw clench in his hand, and to his left side he feels an immense flare of power.

He senses it, as much as the feeling of her skin against his palm. Like breathing, like a heartbeat, he can feel her drawing her magnificent weapon. Glancing down at the power's source, he sees not the sword made of golden light but one that glints of an ordinary metal, etched with glowing red runes that do far less to pierce through the darkness.

It is a very powerful weapon. It is the same weapon. Gilgamesh would know that weapon and its glory anywhere, and he had seen her draw it against his Master not long before. He had noticed it then, but he had not taken note of anything but the sport of it – the entertainment value that came with watching the King of Knights seem to throw her entire being into battle against an addled and mad priest.

Only, it had not been her entire being. Or so he had thought. How else could her beautiful, shining weapon have been so unremarkable?

She has the ability to conceal her sword entirely, to make it invisible with power drawn from the air around her. Gilgamesh knows that. He has seen her grace in battle, both concealed and brought to bare.

There is also the matter that the petty ritual known as the Holy Grail War brought with it some invasive little clusters of information. Gilgamesh had shut off the telepathic link that was possible between himself and his original Master from the start and had objected to every part of this affair that would undermine his sovereignty as King of Creation, but there were certain impositions he had been unable to escape.

When he had seen her sword in action just once, he had known its true nature, its name, the extent of its power, and its classification as a Noble Phantasm with particular prowess in destroying an enemy's fortifications. These were the impressions he had gleaned, helplessly, from the so-called Throne of Heroes. Apart from his own interest in her, these were truths he had been unable to cast aside. He had other purposes, though. Ever since he had learned for her true nature – her nature as a person, as a human being – he has never intended to defeat her, to destroy her. He has instead been interested in her value – as a human, as a treasure worthy of his attention.

The treasure he had sought is standing before him, now. He has never held particular interest in besting her in battle. She has not yet shown herself capable of withstanding the full onslaught of his power, and he has had no wish to test her by any greater fire than is necessary. He does not need to help her crumble when she does such a good job on her own.

The sword was not the treasure he had sought but the one who wields it. He has not taken into consideration every aspect of the sword. All he has truly cared to know is that it is beautiful in her hands and entirely worthy.

As he sees it now, he realizes in the time it takes to draw a breath that Saber has not simply shown the sword in some form of ordinary, boring dullness fit for meager opposition. He realizes that it is possible that she cannot let the blade's brilliance die away in judgment of her opponent. She conceals it with the wind for one reason. Its light – like every shining doorway into his own treasury – is impossible to conceal.

The breath he draws is deeper than most and audible. It is as if his body has found itself in need of more air, more blood, more alertness than he has needed in any expanse of time he can recall. Her blade – Excalibur – shines with blood it has not shed. The runes are beyond his understanding, and he does not have time to see them clearly before he has to _move_.

Gilgamesh has never been bested in battle. He does not allow it. He has always had a choice, each and every time, except _once_.

He is so close to her and she draws her weapon so quickly, drawing it back from wherever their armor had been taken when it had made contact with the mud the broken Grail had spewed forth, he has no recourse but to react with nothing but the strength of his body. He moves backward, turns, and has the impulse to grab for the only thing shielding him.

The movement of the blade is one that could have split open his side if he had remained where he stood. He sees that even with the inelegance brought about by what appears to be feral anger, rage finding its release in her blade, the blade is too fast to track with the simple movement of the eye. The thought that this is what she is when she is brought low does not belong to the future he had imagined, all but foreseen. She is not a little girl, swinging around a blade that has become too heavy for her wrists. She does not melt away into all but nothing. She does not fall to her knees and cry, as he had thought she would.

She has come to the end of her hope. Her reason for seeking such an empty treasure has turned to ash around them both.

She has no reason to continue her fight. The dream she had expressed so fervently has been proven impossible before her eyes. It has been stolen from her by someone who should not have been her enemy. Someone with power imbued in such a small thing, taking control of her destiny, snatching away the promise of a better fate, mocking her with her own hands.

The only way this course of action makes sense is if she has lost sight of her original purpose. The only way she can proceed with this foolish task of trying to cut him down when he is the only one to have offered her any hope, any life at all, is if she has forgotten all of it apart from her need to win. This is neither negotiation nor surrender.

She has no desire but to destroy him.

His cool, collected anger could have been summoned, if only he could more quickly clear this momentary fog of confusion. He steps back to see her rightly, and she is still trying with all her might to slice him in two. There is no game to this, nor even any spirit of mockery. Her eyes may look murky to him, but he can see that to her there is nothing but the most perfect clarity. She will not kneel, she will only cleave.

He will not allow himself to be destroyed. There is no allowance for the destruction of the King of Creation, no matter how lenient he may wish to be with her. He has no choice but to bring forth some defense, but the movement of his body seems to be reluctant to move in accordance with this decree.

His hand comes up. Only one of them, palm facing outward and lifting to the level of his face. The other hand is clinging tightly to the makeshift shawl. It seems that the only plan within his grasp is to take hold of the holy blade itself, imagining that in its dimmed state that it might not burn and cut through him.

It is laughable. This body made of flesh and blood – he refuses to believe that it is so feeble and touched by base fear. Fear leading to stupidity. He lets go with the other hand and the ragged red length of cloth falls to the ground, faintly blown by the wind.

“Saber,” he calls to her in the instant it takes him to dodge another attempt to strike him with her blade. His tone seeks to carry with it the calming, soothing voice of someone patient. And yet, there is nowhere for him to vanish to before her eyes. They are both incarnate, and there is no spirit form for him to take. Even if he would have been willing to resort to such measures under his own command, he has no choice but to move with an awareness of the weight and shape of her blade. At least this time she has taken no steps to conceal it. Body crouching low and springing back to his full height, even without the loss of any sense of his dignity, his tone sounds less calm than he had hoped.

He sounds as if there is some strain in his voice, the breath held in his belly pressed tightly as he tries to move from her range without taking his eyes off her.

“There will be no escape for you!” Saber calls out. She stills her blade and shifts her stance, but it seems that her only purpose in doing so is to show him the hatred in her eyes. It occurs to Gilgamesh that she had used these same words for Kirei, not very long ago at all. It is a shame that she cannot come up with any new ones for him.

He is ready to draw something from his treasury at last, remembering how it had felt to do so when he had walked the Earth the first time. The feeling of difference and the sheer inconvenience brought about by this Holy Grail War truly was unforgivable. Its only redeeming quality has been the woman standing before him. The woman who is ready to move again just as a shimmering fracture in the space just beyond Gilgamesh's hand starts to exist because he commands it.

“Surely you must be tired of this foolish rebellion, Saber,” he says. “There is no reason to oppose me. I do not _oppose_ you—” He tries to reason with her.

The choice of a weapon to wield against her in this moment is a difficult one. If he had desired to see her destruction before she reached the Grail, there would have been no question that she was every bit as worthy as the King of Conquerors of such an end. He would have had no hesitation in calling forth Ea before her. Only this confrontation is different. It seems a bit silly.

“You do not oppose me?” Saber shouts back at him. The notion appears to offend her so deeply that she adjusts her grip on her sword. She seems to wring its hilt, murderous intent finding release there when she cannot land a first blow.

Gilgamesh cannot help the little smile that tugs at his lips. She does not yet know him. She has no way of knowing that if he has ever had a truer weapon than Ea, a truer defense than Enkidu, that both are in the form of his own body.

Heroic Spirits are called into this world to take form in one of the seven vessels created for each of the wars for the Holy Grail. Gilgamesh had been cast in the vessel of Archer, surely for two reasons. The first and – to him – most important must have been that the vessel of the Archer had allowed him to move independently of his Master. The second was his ability to engage in combat from a ranged distance by casting his innumerable treasures down upon his opponent before they could ever come close. What the call of the Grail and this vessel he had been poured into had failed to take into account was that this had never been his preferred method of fighting.

Gilgamesh had been on Earth with no equal. No one could oppose him, and to try meant certain defeat. There had only been one man who had ever come to him as an equal in power. They struggled, they fought, and Enkidu brought him low. In those moments of desperation – those first moments of true fear in his entire life – he learned to call upon those treasures he had come to possess. He had brought them forth and flung them toward Enkidu, who could be anything, so that he might live. In the end, this new arsenal had allowed him to drive Enkidu into a stalemate that had begun their partnership – the only two equals on Earth. But this solution had not been their first form of contest.

The vessel has been broken, and Gilgamesh has been given a body of flesh and blood once more. He is not called forth in the form of an Archer, but simply as himself. No matter what name she may know him by, he is now entirely free to be as he once was. During those first bouts long ago, spanning across days, the only weapon Gilgamesh had needed was his body. Grappling had been a skill of his for far longer than any menial use of the blades and axes in his collection. In this form, the only weapon Gilgamesh needs is his body – even nothing but his bare skin.

From the gate made of light beside him, he grasps the hilt of a beautiful blade. In comparison to some of the treasures he has even allowed her to see, it is quite crude, but there is nothing in his collection that is not worthy of praise. He can avoid her skillful anger for a long while if he is even slightly smart about it. She is a proficient – no, a perfect – swordsman, there is no doubt, but Gilgamesh has grappled with great success against one who was himself a lance, an axe, and a shield. Only, he does not mean to allow her tantrum to go on forever.

“No,” he says as he parries the next swing of her sword with an upward motion. She bears down with her blade. There is a small etching formed in the blade he holds. It is lesser than her holy sword; this is without question. Even so, it is of a quality unique and fine enough to be useful in holding her back, in toying with her, until he can simply convince her to see sense. “I never have...”

He has no intention of persuading her with weapons when words will do. She is so close to him now. The half-mad cast to her eyes is surely something that can be cleared away when she finally sees the truth.

“... I told you from the very first night I saw you for what you are,” Gilgamesh says to her, his arm pushing the blade a little higher beneath Excalibur, “I have only ever believed that there is one way for you to be a king... in all your splendor.” Each moment and every bit of force applied to his blade increases the severity of the damage. When Saber's eyes move to survey the advantage he is giving her, he leans in closer to catch hers. “And you have only shown me more of your beauty since then.”

With every passing breath it becomes more likely that this blade among Gilgamesh's treasures will be lost forever. The etching in the sharp edge will crack and spread; it will shatter. The more his strength resists hers, the closer Saber draws to winning.

She looks at him. Her teeth are clenched and a little bared. What he anticipates first is seeing the return of clarity to her eyes. Even as her heart had continued to break before him, to show its many extant cracks, they had ever been as cool, clear pools in the shade of an oasis. Eyes the color of something familiar, shining and alive. Now they are like the glint of gold dust in water – still beautiful, but murky and deadly to partake.

“You have been my enemy for longer than any of them!” she shouts at him.

He feels his eyes widen.

Something begins to happen in the flow of air around him. The molten glow of red that already seems to drip along Excalibur's blade grows brighter while the hatred in her eyes remains constant.

“The King of Conquerors was a man who honored what he believed,” she says. It seems surprising that she can speak so clearly after seeing her mouth shaped as though it could do nothing but gnash and bite. Her shoulders shift and she begins to bear down with purpose. Friction between the two blades sends sparks flying. “Caster was an unrepentant monster. And I could more easily forgive him than you!”

The friction becomes too great and the blades slide past each other like lightning.

Excalibur finds contact with the weaker blade from underneath without relenting.

“No one I have fought in this war has been more impossible to pity, trust, or honor than you,” she says. For some reason, she makes no effort to drive the blade toward his body. Instead, she pushes at the dull side of his defensive weapon. “Lancer was the first to draw my blade and my blood and you the last, and there have never been two opponents more unalike. He died in a wretched pool of his own blood and shame and you still stand here _naked_ , unharmed, and foolishly proud. Stand no more!”

Then, the red glow of her blade is nothing short of a prophecy.

Gilgamesh's eyes are wide, and he knows that he has wasted his last opportunity to react – to kill, to live.

The last person she had spoken of is him. He is helplessly aware of it.

Rather than finding some opening in the tight grip he keeps on the blade, Excalibur begins to play around it. Gilgamesh feels the rotation in his wrist, in his arm, and in the thudding beat of his heart.

The person she had spoken of most is Lancer. His mind and mouth desperately seek some meaning behind the connection. Only knowing this turn in her mind will not help him at all now. She is not mad or lost as the priest had been. She is entirely aware and calculating as she causes the meager sword to be cast away from his hand.

His fingers release, and there is no word, weapon, or flesh he can hold onto.

She is smaller in frame than he is, but this is now only further proof that she will rend his body at its center. He is skin, blood, and bone, and there is no escaping the fear that comes with it. His feet move backward without thought of reason or pride. He wishes to cry out to someone, to something for help, but there is no time.

The ruined world around them offers no shelter or solace to him. It only proves to be a snare at his feet as he falls backward. His hands fly out to break his fall. He is still stronger than many men, but none of this matters as he scrambles backward as a frightened child. Whether it is yet broken or not, he feels the sting of jagged debris biting into his palms. It is almost laughable that they have sought to save him from greater pain, from humiliation and from being broken. They cannot do anything to stop her holy blade.

Perhaps now she will take his head rather than his heart. Her sword seems high above him now. Beyond this sword and the wrath hung upon her face, the smoke seems to have taken on a different quality. It seems lighter – the backdrop for this glinting power that no evil and no heartbreak can entirely ruin or tarnish.

His perfect focus is the last thing left to him as she starts to strike her killing blow. He could not have looked away even if he had wanted to, but what he sees now strikes him as both familiar and strange.

As when she had lifted Excalibur in all its former brilliance to destroy the Holy Grail, lovely golden light begins to shower over it. First at the tip, causing it to glow like a torch in the darkness. Just as when she had been compelled by the Command Seal and had resisted with all her might, she seems frozen in place. This time, he is close enough to see when her eyes shift to the offending blade. The shadow of betrayal in them seems drowned out as murky yellow starts to reflect far more perfect gold.

In an instant, the light floods to the hilt of Excalibur. It is almost like watching the first fires of creation burn, existing where once there was nothing. Only this is an emptiness and a darkness filled up by heat and hope. It is the first fire of humankind, then. It is sad and small, not shining as bright or as far as it had against the demon in the dark water. It coils around its source, feeding into itself, not to kill but to keep something alive.

Saber's attention does not return to him right away. The returned glow of her blade seems to sustain itself, and for a long time she simply looks at it. It lowers with a release of tension from her shoulders. They seem neither slumped nor high, but there is a shudder that runs through her body. It is faintly visible with the release of her breath through parted lips. They draw closed again and she holds Excalibur high between both hands.

She no longer targets him with it.

Instead, it is held squarely toward the center of the air in front of her. Tension comes across her illumined face, furrowing her light brow tight. Her hands release in one smooth motion and the hilt of Excalibur seems held in place by an unseen grasp that is not her own. Her fingers tighten slightly and then release as the blade rains down a little more light. With that, it fades from view and she is still. She is silent.

“Do you yield, Saber?” Gilgamesh asks. His elbow is crooked against the ground. When he turns to find a way to push himself to his feet, it slides against the muddy earth. Ordinary mud, now it seems. He is turned onto his side for a brief moment, weight leaned against his forearm, and he laughs. The question carries with it dry mirth that can only come from being intimately close to death. He is seated upright then – like a man who has realized his place apart from the animals.

He is slow to lift his eyes to her again, but at last he does. They are clear and some color of life.

“Yes,” she says. The moment he has caught her eyes, she turns her face away. In the same movement, her left hand extends to him. The sleek glove that covers it dimly reflects the gray light that starts to overtake the nightmarish embers of the night. Her thumb seems to consciously brush against the side of her finger before both spread into a steady, supportive cup to brace him as he stands. “I... yield to you,” she says. Her tongue catches on the words. In spite of the shame that carries in her tone, he first believes that this must be even her serious words tasting absurdity.

“... Gilgamesh,” she adds, calling into question his conclusion – the word foreign, strange, and delicate in her mouth.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has been in production since last year sometime. I am posting it here after posting parts of it on the Beast's Lair forum because I have decided I would like my work to live here as well. I always welcome feedback. Rated for later chapters.


	4. Convenient Accommodations

The sound of the rain drumming against the window glass is unrelenting. The first drops had fallen, fat and plodding, the very moment her fever had begun to break. Now, it seems they will never stop. They have become thin streaks that fall so close together that they look to form a curtain made of needles between this house and everything, except possibly for the nearby trees. The gray light that comes in through the window is the only light in the room.

The house is dark and quiet.

Looking out the window, rather than turning around to face the rest of the room, is the simplest option. As long as she does not let her eyes break with the scene beyond the window, it is almost like this has not happened. It is almost like those trees could be anywhere in the world, at any time between the end of time and the beginning of it. This rain could be falling onto the sodden soil of Britain, and she need never know the difference. If only she could keep looking, past the pristine glass and nowhere beyond that row of trees.

The moment she sees her own eyes interrupting the scene, she knows the truth. Fixing her gaze on the familiar form of her reflection, imperfect and faint like in a shaded pool of water, she has no choice but to see the glass for what it is. It is something keeping her inside, keeping the rain out, and it is something of this era, not her own.

She raises her hand with a thought to touch the glass. She does not know what she means to test it for, but she does so gingerly. A single fingertip touches the pane and she draws it away with a curling of her hand. On the glass, there is a faint, lined reminder that someone has touched it. Her brow tightens with concentration as she considers the very clear concentric pattern, interrupted by a few little lines that look like guesses at covering imperfections in the delicate loops. They are difficult to follow, but she can see them.

Before she realizes it, she has leaned in closer to the window. She notices only when her breath becomes as visible as the touch of her finger against the glass. She straightens and brushes both hands down against the front of her body, over ribs that feel surprisingly intact. She cannot say the same for her suit.

She breathes in, drawing her abdomen tight. Her fingers run down, feeling the subtle rise of each of the buttons – one, two, three. In spite of everything, the buttons have held in place. She drops her head to see where her fingers lose contact with the final button, and takes note of the dull sheen of the gloves that cover up her hands. She starts with them.

She plucks them off and lets them rest neatly across each other on a dressing table. Her fingers curl inward, testing their flexibility. Her palms face upward. They are strikingly light in contrast to the dark shades of the fabric that cover the rest of her body. After they seem sure, her hands return to her body to feel along the seams of her jacket. None of them even seem frayed.

The trouble is, she knows that it is not as simple as the pieces that make up her garments holding together. She can feel it each time she moves, the way that all across the smooth fabric there are swaths of stain. The stains are thick where they linger, making the fabric stiffer than it ought to be. The feeling is particularly noticeable down her back, all the way down her legs. On her right flank, she can see a flourish of sandy-colored soil that has made a home atop and between the fibers of her clothing.

If there is any way to restore the clothing to be as it once was, she does not know what it would be. She cannot imagine that such an abundance of mud and filth will ever completely wash out.

In the same movement, her fingers begin to work at the buttons as she looks back over her shoulder. She sees the bed askance. She looks back down at the front of her own form as the jacket slips away and she takes it by the back of its collar. Considering the mud, it occurs to her that she had never removed her shoes at the door. She had known that it was customary to do so in this country, but her first tour of the house had been with a cloud of sickness still lingering over her head. She had no intention of honoring customs or wishes or requests any more than she had already agreed to.

Now, she steps out of her shoes. She nudges them out of the way with her foot until they rest just to the side of the dressing table. She finally turns back to the bed and its contents, which she had purposefully only half-seen when she had been shown to this bedchamber. She had been brought here by the wicked priest Archer made it his business to hold company with. She had listened to very little he had to say, gleaning only the points most pertinent to surviving this place.

A part of her does not know why she had listened that much. Yet, the part of her that has always tried to listen will not just stop trying.

Somewhere in the silent house, a sound rings out. It squeaks and sings as a valve is tightened. The response seems to be silence where there had been the quick sound of water rushing that she had first mistaken as part of the rain. She looks toward the ceiling, past the bed's canopy, then down a wall and to the floor. She knows that the sound comes from beneath her, but it seems to come from everywhere at once like a faint reminder that the house is occupied by someone apart from her. It seems far away, and she determines that it is not a threat. With no more need of distraction, her eyesight focuses keenly on the bed.

The bedclothes are smooth and neatly made. The sheets are white, while the heavier blankets are decorated with a pattern of officious carmine flowers that reach out to meet one another in squared sections with a more shyly pink backdrop. The smooth blanket's pattern is interrupted by a few distinctly arranged displays. The embroidery that gives the blanket its pattern seems to be constructed of thread that might give off a brighter, almost glinting shine if only more light were given to the room.

To her left hand, there is a light blue skirt. When she touches it – because of course she understands, these are for her – a sheer layer of fabric crumples in her hand. Another sheer layer rests beneath the first, and a third, each longer than the last. A fourth and shorter layer, an opaque underskirt, at least seems to be made of something that is sound to the touch. Each layer is pleated with the same regularity, loose and flowing. With its dull color and cascading layers of fabric, it reminds her of the sheets of rain presently falling from the sky. The waist has no ties, no buttons, and not even zippers. Instead, it tightens inward around itself into a small shape that will stretch around her body, holding itself above her hips.

Tucked beneath the waist of the skirt is a delicate top. It is constructed of a familiar, floral pattern in something that looks like netting but which is much more fine, soft to the touch. While she has not learned the names of any of these fabrics, she knows simply from looking, only from touching, that they are very well-made. The shirt would be nearly see-through were it not for the matching lining affixed inside. It, too, is soft and seems to move more like water than cloth. The lining only extends around the torso and up to a thin section at the shoulders. She can see the bedspread through the sleeves. They spread out, wide and gentle, like weak and impossible wings.

Beside these things, there is a pair of simple, dark brown shoes. They are not very resilient, but they will cover the bottoms of her feet and her toes. They will provide no soundness to her ankles, no protection, but they are certainly shoes.

At the foot of the bed, there is a box constructed of very thick paper. It is square and decorated with thick stripes of white, black, and an obtrusive shade of pink. Carefully, she lifts the lid from the box and peers at what is inside, tucked neatly inside a wholly pink lining. There are three distinct sets of undergarments. Two are softer, lighter, and less rigid in form – one set is white, the other some shade that is only a little darker than the color of her skin. The third set is more sturdy in its construction with cleaner lines and a watery shine. It is a dark shade of blue. Without comment, internal or otherwise, she places the lid back on the box.

The final arrangement, closer to the head of the bed and its row of pillows, is the last one she turns her attention to. It is the simplest, and it does not take long to work out its purpose. It is long, and lying on the bed it is nearly shapeless. It is so long that it seems it will cover her small form from neck to ankle. It looks almost rectangular without a person wearing it and has long sleeves. The only fitted part of the garment seems to be those sleeves from elbow to wrist. The closure is made up of many small buttons, covered with little cloth garments of their own. To either side of the closure, there are many tight, permanent gathers extending out about the length of a finger. Looking at them, they remind her of dozens of sets of rib bones from a tiny animal, but they are made of nothing of the sort. The fabric feels cool when she touches it. It is almost enough to send goose pimples down her arm. It is cool, and yet it is of a thickness and durable flexibility that makes her think it feels almost safe. It seems like it would be capable of being warm, given some source of heat. She understands that this gown has been provided to her for the purposes of sleeping. She understands that it could not be more simple, more plain, but what she notices most of all is that it is the purest shade of white she has ever seen.

Her fingers feel along the tight ribbing, and as her palm flattens out she can feel the longing pull of fatigue. She could shed her dirty clothes in favor of this clean covering and fall on the bed. She would not even mind that it did not belong to her. The heaviness in her limbs needs some kind of respite, time to repair, and this soft, simple thing almost calls to her.

She shakes off the temptation to give in and fall asleep now. She glances at the long shadow she and the bedposts cast across the floor. It is still daylight, however dreary, and so she rejects the thought of sleep as much as she would have rejected wine laced with poison. She draws the lid from the box at the foot of the bed once more, roughly taking hold of one of the softer sets of undergarments. The delicate white fabric compresses almost entirely into her hand. She also chooses the clothing provided to her for daytime wear, taking care to hook the two little brown shoes in her fingers. She keeps them clutched tightly toward her palm, clinging to them like a lifeline. Even if they are useless in comparison to some boots she has worn, she has a strong conviction that she may need some covering for her feet. She will not run away in them, but she also has no desire to show herself weak.

Outside the door, the hallway is empty. It is brighter than the bedroom with a long expanse of windows. Looking left and right, she steps out into the corridor. She tests the handle, closing the door tightly behind her, making sure it will open to her again before she sets out into the open space. A floorboard creaks softly beneath her feet as she makes her way toward the stairs.

She stops out in the open. She feels exposed, halfway between her room and her intended destination. Something compels her to look back at a darkened part of the path behind her.

After the row of windows, there is a sudden and almost complete lack of light. Only small and crisscrossed beams of sunlight reach it, illuminating air that has a faint glitter of dust wafting around in it. It makes the house seem neglected more than abandoned – too empty and not empty enough.

The light that reaches the shaded space comes from an open door. Around that corner, she hears the faintest indication of movement. Fabric on fabric, one material rougher than the other. Her breath holds in her chest as she comes closer, further and further from sunlight.

Around the corner, the sight she sees is strange for how unremarkable it is. A man in a priest's garb kneeling on the floor. His head is bowed, the crown of his dark hair clearly visible while he shows no part of his face. At first, he seems to be at prayer. The sound is familiar. His voice is low but so deep it carries to her where she stands in silence. The phrase, spoken in Latin, sounds like a confident exhortation, befitting the words of a priest.

Only, this is not a house of worship. The room beyond the doorway is well-furnished, comfortable and ornate, but there is no altar. There is no focal point for prayer, no forward-facing seating to do away with worldly distractions. The chairs in the room are drawn instead toward the singular focus of a low table. This room is designed for matters of men, matters of business, and matters of state. It is certainly no house of God. No, this is the place is where the things that must be repented of are decided.

While it is no fit domain for a priest, the priest before her seems entirely at ease where he bows in mockery of his vocation. Upon the fine rug, there is a stain – a stain which neither water nor time could seem to wash out. The fact that it is blood is obvious to Artoria Pendragon without question, but the smell that is summoned up into the air leaves no doubt.

He pours the contents of one vial and then another. The contents are clear, flowing from darkened containers that seem to indicate a uniform origin. When the liquid touches the carpet, it seeks out the blood, once dried, and causes it to become a rich and vital red. Pooling up from the fibers in a bubbling puddle, the bloodstain lifts higher until it floats like a cloud. It becomes an almost mocking pink, and as the man – Kotomine Kirei – runs the back of his hand through the sickly cloud, the smell of heated metal fills the air. His prayer continues, either incantation or cheerful blasphemy.

His head lifts up, betraying his malicious joy through the smile on his lips. The strange, fading pink mist creates a curtain of thinned, fading blood between them that seems to leave the world somewhere just above his head. It is neither as dark nor as thick as it ought to be, then it is gone as if it never was.

Standing to watch this process makes Artoria feel as if the vanished blood clings to her skin. Her eyes narrow with derision, but she cannot look away from the aftermath of this murder.

“You killed the master of this house,” she says. That Kotomine Kirei is a murderer is no surprise to her. Every look at his fingers reminds her of the lives he has destroyed. One life, chiefly among all others. She thinks of it more calmly than she had been able before. Irisviel had been a sacrifice from the beginning. She understands that now, and she knows that there is more than one man to blame for her death. Irisviel had tried to warn her, but it does nothing to cleanse the blood from this man's hands. He does not even try to wash them clean, instead dirtying them with even more pointless sacrifice and death.

“It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment...” Kotomine says, familiar words in a foreign tongue. His smile becomes more sinister, and he appears proud of himself.

Artoria's hands clench and her jaw sets. She searches for words, but there are none for this man, for this monster. Even with the cloud of fever drained from her body, there is no room to reason with him, and she cannot pass judgment. All she can do before him is breathe in and breathe out the scent of the same blood he has spilled.

She looks down at the perfect carpet, the blood's absence as sickening as the stain itself had been. Powerless as a king, complicit as a witness, she turns to walk away. It is the only judgment she can make.

 

┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

 

The washroom is a strange rush of warmth in the cold, empty house. The air is thicker, like the dew of sweat that lingers after happy sparring on a summer's day. It seems strange, when all the rest of the house is pervaded by the breath of damp, dreary winter. The large mirror is nearly clear, but the mist clings to its edges as her own breath had clung to the window upstairs. Thinking it through, she comes to the conclusion that the sound she had heard was of this room meeting its use for another.

With Kotomine Kirei upstairs, draped in his black priestly garb, making revelry of his sins, it can only mean one thing. He is still here. Tension swells in her shoulders as she looks left and right, but there is no sign of the Archer, the man called Gilgamesh, in this narrow pair of rooms.

The exhale that overtakes her comes from deep inside. She braces her small stack of clothes against the bathroom vanity, her head bowing forward as she feels as if all her breath is about to leave her. She feels that it has been a long time since she could allow her shoulders to slump, her small frame to nearly give way under the weight of everything. She sucks in another breath, her eyes shut tight, and she thinks she might have nothing left between herself and the tears she had left at Camlann.

If she lets them fall, will it take her back there? Will it wake her from this strange, impossible dream?

One of the little brown shoes falls to the floor with a _clack_ of its sole.

Her eyes open up, falling past the glinting flecks of stone in the surface she is using to hold herself up. She looks at the shoe and, with a huff of something like mundane disgust, she picks it up.

She examines the room with her clothes tucked into the crook of her arm. It does not take her long to find a dry towel. She retreats entirely into the second section of the washroom where the larger plumbing is placed.

She pushes back the faintly dripping curtain, peering down into the bathing pool. Fresh clothes set aside, she examines its mechanisms as she methodically removes the rest of her dirty clothes. Shed one piece at a time and with little care, she hardly notices her own body until there is an uncomfortable pull of fabric tugging away the remnant of dried blood from her thigh.

She only looks down at her injured leg when she has corked the drain and set the tub to filling with warm, nearly hot water. She fiddles with the valve until it is as hot as she can touch without drawing away. Seated on the edge of the tub, she examines her unclothed body with careful attention to the puncture wounds that remain. That should remain.

Her body had been pushed to its limit before she had ever laid eyes on the Holy Grail. Even the thought of how far she had gone, how much she had fought, what she had done to reach that beautiful, sad light, and all for naught, is nearly enough to tempt her to tears again. She only closes her eyes. Opening them again, she still finds that her crooked thigh shows only the shadow of a wound, blood painted over unbroken skin. She can see the lines his blades at left, but they are just a shade of sickly, pure white.

Her thumb tests what her eyes see, and when she feels no sting of pain, no heat of infection, she curls her fingers away and braces herself to lower into the water. Shutting off the valve once she is beneath it, she settles into water hot enough to turn her pale skin faintly red. For a while, she sits in this shallow pool, knees lifted, elbows touching them, and head bowed. Her fingers slide up into her loosened hair, and she closes her eyes, feeling nothing but warmth like fire seeking out her bones.

There is no sense in her survival. She had been a few poorly placed movements from death before she had ever stood before Archer in that great, now ruined hall. Lancelot had nearly killed her, and part of her had been ready to let him. Finally, her eyes do sting. She reaches down and takes cupped hands full of water and splashes them against her face. Her tears will do nothing for him now.

Gradually, she unwinds her posture and starts to wash away blood and sweat and water alone. Whatever has left behind the healing skin she finds, she cannot help but feel it is both undeserved and treacherous. She had him. She had been ready to take the head of the man who could be nothing but her enemy while he spoke words of love, peace, even marriage. But he had been there – ruined, on the ground, disarmed in the filth that covered so many stolen lives – and she had not been able to do it.

She searches her palms for some hint, but what had been in her hands is gone. It had seemed to flow from Excalibur itself. Some melody of hope and mercy that has never belonged on a battlefield. A melody she certainly cannot hear, even in memory, anymore. She knocks her hands against the water with fruitless anger, catching ragged breaths.

“What mercy is letting him live?” she asks herself aloud.

Alarmed by the sound of her own voice, she forces herself to be taken with her surroundings. With no answer for her question, she takes one of the bottles from the side of the tub. There are several, and each of them is ornate in one way and then another. With squinting eyes and careful touch, she uses each several of them for their intended purpose, washing away whatever she can with the smell of flowers and honey.

When she has washed whatever she can away and the water around her has begun to cool, she stands just outside the tub, water dripping from her body and onto a rug. She clutches the thick towel around herself and begins to dab away the water. The tub drains, gurgling down the water so loudly that she hardly hears the sound ahead of her.

The latch on the outer door of the washroom giving way is just a soft click, but Saber knows to trust nothing either of the men in this house might do. There is no one else here. They had killed the person who ought to be here, and no soap, water, or magic will wash that away.

“Saber,” he calls to her, his voice low and happily unassuming, always at odds with his actions. She can tell Archer is somewhere just beyond the door, but his voice seems to have halted before coming the rest of the way through. She glares at him through the wooden pane, but remains calm and methodical as she puts on her undergarments. The first piece is quite obvious, not difficult at all, but the second is more of a puzzle she has never needed to solve before. Her glare and deep frown shift to it.

She tries to move quickly, but she is not certain how to put it on. Her shoulders shrug and squirm beneath the brassiere, its straps loose and falling over her shoulders until she pulls the pieces of the band at her ribs taut. At once, the straps are too tight, pressing into her flesh. With audible, frustrated breath, she feels a shiver of anxiety run over her bare skin as she slides the whole thing down to examine it.

She looks at it with contempt, feeling along its delicate construction until she comes to the rounded, white, hard hooks. Holding them close to her face, she practices the movement, seeing the way two of them come together at the center to firm up the strap. Then she tests the same metallic, white slides, feeling as they make the straps longer with adjustment. She concentrates, for a moment, on making them even.

Back along her arms, up to her shoulders, she exhales. The straps settle atop her skin rather than pressing welts into it. She pulls tighter and aims the hooks against one another. They fail to catch. She tries again, twisting as she can feel her shoulder blades jutting out. She knows with every passing moment he is more likely to do something even more wearisome, but she refuses to answer until she is ready. She tries a third time, and finally one hook catches. She loosens her grip and dances her fingers along until she can align the second set of hooks, securing them both in place. Her breath releases, and she tries the movement at her waist. Once she settles a little, lowering her hands loosely to her sides, it feels a little more like protection than unusual restraint.

“Why have you come here, Archer?” she demands, only when she is covered by that much. She picks up the skirt, straightening its layers before stepping into it while she awaits for an inevitable, unwanted reply.

“You've been in here quite a long time,” he remarks. He always speaks as if they are negotiating while he has the upper hand. She cannot help the grinding in her teeth. “I thought I would come to see what was taking you so long.”

The layers of her skirt fall over her hips, each of them light before finally settling into a shape that rests some weight over her thighs. She reaches for the shirt and has no choice but to handle it delicately. The lace folds over her hands with an easy, cool touch that makes her have even more impulse to grasp at it. When she has oriented it the right way, she pulls it down over her head, arms finding their places in the airy sleeves. No matter how firmly she pulls it in place, it is still still too light to the touch.

“I am sure the priest would prefer your company,” she counters. The only satisfaction she has is stamping her feet down into the shoes.

Her hair still drips, and she tends it with the towel. Only when she can no longer feel droplets making their way down her back, into the groove of her spine, she reaches out for the door handle with one hand. She keeps minding her hair with the towel with the other. He is halfway between her and the outer door, his back leaned against the wall. She does not look above or below his waist, her eyes cast down with disinterest rather than shame.

“Does it matter?” he scoffs when she is in his sight. “When I would much rather see how you find it here...”

She continues to ignore him as she makes her way past, but something catches her. His hand just above her waist, cupping at her rib cage. She looks up at him, affronted, but he only smiles into her deadly eyes.

“You should answer me,” he instructs her, as if tutting a child.

Caught close, she can only look up at him to speak to him without looking like exactly that.

“I have no words for you—”

“Of course you do,” he interrupts her. With that, a fingertip brushes her lips to hush her. As he lowers his hand, he gently pulls and the towel she had forgotten about holding easily slides from her grip, however tight it is. “Unless you would prefer I stop talking,” he suggests, his tone recovering its confident lechery she has despised from the start.

A fluffy, dampened towel bunched at their feet. She looks down and sees it, the dark trousers he wears taking in as little of her attention as she can allow. She senses the movement before it happens and is as ready to strike back as if he had drawn another blade to hurl at her. She snarls with disgust as she looks back up at him, her own back to the wall now. He leans over her, reaching up for her jaw.

She dimly remembers the same when she had known nothing but his taunts and the fire.

This time, she reaches up to catch his wrist. She grips it tightly until she feels the bones respond to her hand. Only then, she locks her eyes onto his – wide, interested, and the red of a precious stone.

“If you touch me like this again, I will leave you with scars that will never heal so long as you walk this earth,” she warns. Her gaze falls in time with her words before she jabs her elbow into his abdomen hard enough to push him back. He forces a laugh through the gasp for air it causes. Being so close to him, she notices something else when she pushes him away. His stomach gurgles, and it is such an odd thing to notice after her anger has been so highly demanded of her. Her hand securely on the doorknob, already turning it, she glances back at him one more time. “And you should learn to tell the difference in your appetites.”

A heartier laugh certainly had not been what she intended to draw from him, but she hears it from within the washroom as she walks away, leaving all her shed dirty clothes and him behind.

She sets out across the living room, its furnishings all oriented toward a great fireplace. It is empty and cool.

“Oh, Saber?” he calls, his voice carrying through this one as it had in the last.

She looks back only with a half-longing glance at the swords arranged as part of a display above the mantel, the coat of arms above the fireplace. She looks at him, believing he will understand that she has far more intent to fight than to talk.

“Don't you have words for me?” he taunts again.

She looks at him with icy expectation and silence.

“You mentioned having other appetites,” he echoes to her, pacing out into the room. He does not go far, this time keeping some distance from her, though she hardly believes it to be out of healthy fear of her anger. “And so I ask, Saber, where else would you go?”

“Speak plainly, Archer,” she warns him.

“Are you hungry?” he asks her, apparently very compliant and nearly disinterested. He pokes at a detail on one of the unlit lamps in the room.

She narrows her eyes and watches him quietly. He does not seem to have any purpose for his question beyond the topic at hand.

“You are offering me food?” she asks.

“If my appetite for such a thing has been roused in this era, surely yours has been too,” he counters.

“You are offering me food that belongs to the master of this house, whom you killed,” she says, rather than addressing his presumption. She accuses him with her body angled toward the mantel in such a way that she thinks it matters little whether she has the strength to summon Excalibur to her hand or not.

Rather than a returned challenge or even mocking amusement, he answers her with a short sigh. He walks past her, as she had tried to walk past him, without being stopped.

“Come with me,” he instructs her.

Her back tenses, her jaw sets, her fists clench, but to defy him leaves her with no more options than to obey him. Before he walks out of sight, she follows him, if only to seek out an opportunity for their combat to be justly renewed. She is convinced now that she made a mistake in letting him live.

He leads her to a kitchen rather than a dining hall, where there are two bowls with simple, large spoons and a mixture of red-brown sauce and something filling it. The blonde colored pieces are something she cannot identify, and the most recognizable thing appears to be tiny loops of green on top in the center – a plant, at least. While she spends a moment looking at it, he stands before it and takes one of the bowls into his right hand. His left reaches for the other and holds it up to her, expecting that she take it.

She does not waste the energy on giving him a further glare than she is already giving the food. She scoops up the bowl in both her hands and follows once more to an open table where she reluctantly takes a seat. The bowl is still faintly warm to her hands, and she takes a moment to let go.

“That was hot some time ago,” he remarks, making it impossible to forget his presence.

Rather than responding to him, she sets the bowl down and takes up a spoonful. She holds it near her mouth but does not move to eat it before she smells it.

“The food isn't stolen,” he adds, uninvited as ever. “It belongs to Kirei.”

The attachment of that name to it almost takes her appetite, but she realizes that if she does not speak that he will never quiet.

“And you do not believe it is poison for us both?” she asks, but she does not look up from what appears to be some kind of hot-smelling food.

She notices that he takes a few bites of it. She hears him swallow, and the closeness of it makes her choose to look at him, occupying more than one of her senses. She takes a small bite, not so much tempted as challenged, as she had been with the wine.

“He wouldn't,” he remarks when he notices that she has responded somehow.

“What honor is there among murderers?”

The adjustment of his grip on his spoon only serves to confirm what she believes about him. He has a blackened fire always coursing just beneath the surface, and she can feel it even in his sweetened words. The room is filled with knives, and more than any fear she feels it might be some welcome break from pretense, battle breaking from stilted banquet.

“If it pleases you to know, this place has been Kirei's home for some time. The master of his house was killed before that farcical war ended, and I am sure that even in your righteousness you understand the need for _sacrifices_ in war,” he bites out before biting into his food with equal vigor.

The food does not repulse her, but its texture is strange and spices in it burn her tongue and numb her lips, but as she stares at him these strange sensations are nearly lost on her. She sets the spoon down where it fits along the edge of the bowl.

“The three of you,” she says, watching him without wavering. “The three of you were in the church...” She thinks it through, looking past the lascivious gaze she had thought to burn out of him with her eyes. “Where is he now?” she asks, already knowing the answer. “Your Master...”

“My first Master is dead,” he concludes for her, having eaten enough that he is idly spooning at dregs in his bowl.

“The blood upstairs belonged to Tohsaka Tokiomi, and this is his home,” she says, taking in the truth rather than questioning it.

“I am surprised, however glad, that you made it so far as to be the last one to challenge me,” he remarks with half-hearted humor that does not reach his face.

She returns her attention to her bowl, taking in the food methodically without regard to the spice. She watches as the food disappears, each bite a step closer to leaving this table without a hole gnawing at her stomach. This had been Tohsaka Tokiomi's house, and she had never known. The maps she had been shown, the plans that had been discussed without any regard to her input, all of them now empty and dead. She had come here in a feverish haze, and she had never come here before. There had been so many things Emiya Kiritsugu had not been obliged to share with her, and so many of them could have been useful. It is a surprise that she had made it so far, as Archer has pointed out, with her Master telling her nothing, trusting her with nothing except those things he had already been prepared to lose.

As she scoops her bowl nearly dry, she knows that she has given herself time in this place. She has prolonged her life for another few days, but the need to survive drums to the back of her mind as it has since the Holy Grail was again lost to her. Instead, she simply notices the gnawing that remains in her stomach – not hunger, but a pang of envy.

“It is better, isn't it? To kill than to be killed,” Archer remarks.

Artoria puts down her bowl and spoon, sitting back from the table.

“We are to protect our Masters with our lives,” she recites.

“And in exchange, we are given the opportunity to achieve any wish our hearts could desire,” he says, believing in the emptiness of his words. He scoffs a little after them. “And what when a Master _knows_ he cannot spare your life to achieve his ends? Your Master, who leans on you for protection in his time of greatest need...”

Artoria looks down at her forearm. The skin there has prickled with cold she cannot feel, but there is no gleefully wicked smile to accompany Archer's feat. Instead, he looks like a far-off wise man, laying down the most basic rules of a magic or an ideology. He is reciting law. She swallows tightly.

“Is it murder or is it a _right_ to save your own life, King of Knights?”

She does not understand him, and she does not understand the way her heart beats faster – the rush of the moment just before a sword clash, the building gallop of a steed hurtling toward an open sky. She settles her feet on the floor and pushes the rest of the way back from the table. She stands, looking down at the bowl as if the dish might offer some anchor, some notion as to what to do with it.

“Enough,” she warns him. Then, to have something to do with her hands, she takes up her bowl and spoon and places them – empty – back in the place where they had started. They clatter against each other, refusing to settle in the same way she cannot settle her fingers. They do not tremble, but her thumbs trace along each of the others. She stares at them before she drops them down to her sides.

“If you had a choice... your Master or your lost country—” he says from somewhere behind her. She remembers that she needs to walk away.

“Enough!” she demands of him again. She leaves the kitchen, visions of blood dripping from the knives left behind lit behind her eyes.

She does not know whose blood it is.


	5. Acceptable Oversight

 

The rain pours down continually, like the apology of a fickle god. The fire, both across the land and in her blood, has already gone out, but the rush of water does not subside. It hushes the world, like a crying child. He can feel the calm washing over everything, and it does not sit well with him. He glances toward the doorway again, privately letting out a deep breath.

Then he is on his feet, casually dropping his dish into the sink basin as he passes. There is unspent energy in his arms, in his legs, everywhere. It occurs to him that she has once again taken it upon herself to take her leave without the slightest hesitation, but there is no thrill in the thought of pursuit. He retraces their steps through the lower level. For a while, he stands before the mantel and considers the blades that had so seemed to tempt Saber's hand. He had not feared them in the slightest, but closer consideration shows that the blades in the display are genuine, however mundane their craftsmanship may be.

He reaches out to drag his finger along the flat side of one of the crossed blades, considering the small frame of her body wresting one of them free. The troublesome part of it is that she would have been able to handle such a blade as well as it could be handled. He knows that. Only, there is no beauty in the blade worthy of her hands, and he would sooner take up a rock.

When his fingers reach the hilt, his hand drops back to his side. There is a smirk on his face.

“There will be time for everything, Saber,” he hums to himself. The words seem more familiar and more true in this place, where he is alone, where there is no lingering melodrama of the farcical war. He wonders which tongue he speaks in – true language, or the strange one the so-called Grail has granted for this land and its war alone. Either way, it is nonsense to speak to no one. Only, it seems that there is nothing to concern himself with now apart from nonsense, for a while.

With this in mind, he leaves the room and climbs the stairs up to where the house's other two occupants are. His eyes fall on the closed door first, the heavy shadow of its frame, deepened by the light coming in through the row of windows. The light looks very white through the curtains with no warmth in it at all. He considers her door. He lingers by it. Rather than touching it, he moves past it, heading toward a more familiar room.

“Even the man's stain could not bear to be uncooperative,” Gilgamesh remarks, almost as if he feels some pity. It would be convincing, if not for the lingering smirk. His foot, covered in simple cloth, brushes along the edge of the large pool that had once been Tohsaka Tokiomi's lifeblood, nudging as it had before. Where it ought to have been, there is no thick slide of blood, nor is there any bristly resistance from its dried, dead form. Instead, there is no drop of anything at all.

Before him, Kirei turns around in the chair behind Tokiomi's desk. The remnants around the room that show their lack of disturbance since Tokiomi had breathed his last have not yet all been cleared away. The table around which Kirei and Tokiomi had gathered still bears the traces of tea, of the trust that Kirei had made absolute mockery of. The thought of the dagger, gifted to him as a trusted apprentice, even as a member of the Tohsaka family, thrusting through Tokiomi's back and into his heart still has some dramatic relish to it which has not yet lost its savor. This room, and the look on Kirei's face as he sits within it, feel alive.

Kirei responds to his voice, but not with choosing to stand, not with choosing to get out of the chair, kneel on the floor, and bow his face to the ground. This is the difference between Kirei and Tokiomi which seems most striking as Kirei leans forward against his elbows. The unruliness of the scene, the job half-done, seems to be something which Kirei himself wishes to observe.

With another glance to the floor, back toward where the blood ought to be, mingled with the fabric in a way that might never have come out, Gilgamesh realizes that Kirei must have been kneeling on the floor some time ago. He feels some small sense of loss at the thought. He would have liked to have seen it, if only to know what that particular farce looked like.

He would have enjoyed the joke.

“By the end of today, it will be as if none of that unpleasant business ever happened,” Kirei remarks when he decides to speak.

“Such a pitiable turn of events,” Gilgamesh allows as he continues his sweeping assessment of the room.

Kirei straightens his spine and glances over to the low table. He nods toward it when he has Gilgamesh's attention, directing him without any sense of shame. He still seems distracted, too enthralled by the previous night's end to consider his place.

“I believe our pact had been discovered,” he notes. “Truly, there is no sanctuary when at war.”

“Our pact,” Gilgamesh echoes to him. His eyes study the placement of things on the table. He can recognize that this place has been disturbed if he allows himself, but it is of no consequence to him. “You fear the discovery of your crime?” he asks. At this point, quizzing Kirei about his mind's misdeeds is more a habit than a pastime. He can hardly spare a thought for it while he stands before him, hands in trouser pockets, shoulders down with an absolute refusal to consider Kirei's posture of authority one he cannot abide for now. This had been Tokiomi's throne, not his own, after all. A lesser place, indeed.

“Not at all,” Kirei admits. He once again finds laughter, but it seems more comfortable this time. It does not wrack his body with ugly spasms. Instead, it seems a nearly natural part of his voice, nearly like a normal man.

“Shall the intruder be punished?” Gilgamesh asks, still idle.

“I believe he is already dead,” Kirei says. It is not spoken like a truth but rather like a hope, an amusement.

“The man, then?” Gilgamesh questions again, expecting at least some returned effort from Kirei in holding such a conversation.

“Which one?” Kirei asks, as if to show himself proud of his enemies. Only, they both know he had only ever believed himself to have one worthy of playing coy about. He looks down at the surface of the desk, and from it he picks up a writing tool. He does not find paper and instead simply positions it in his hand. Gilgamesh wonders what significance this holds to him and lets himself wonder, only for an instant. This line of questioning seems to be yielding very little as he searches for some entertainment in it. His eyes narrow, not quite from anger. “Saber's Master?”

Then, Gilgamesh's narrowed eyes feel like prescience, a sense of something to come that he tries to ignore. The air in the room seems a little cooler, the center of his chest a little hotter, a little more tightly wound. He does not change his posture at all.

“She might be... protective of him,” Kirei suggests, sounding very nearly bored.

The anger that creeps in after Kirei's reply is dull, frustrating. Gilgamesh tightens a hand into a fist. He knows that it would be nothing to destroy Kotomine Kirei where he sits, and the emptiness of the thought crushes the motivation to act upon it in the same breath.

“No,” he says instead. “She harbors no _affection_ for the man she formerly held a pact with.”

“Have you led her affections elsewhere, Gilgamesh?” Kirei asks. He sets down the writing instrument and carefully straightens it with his fingers. He pushes at it, making it turn over, his movements almost like those of a child absolutely convinced of his own innocence. Innocence to which, Gilgamesh is certain, Kirei holds no genuine or desired claim now.

“Do you have any doubts concerning her?” Gilgamesh challenges him, his outward expression indifferent.

“It is my concern that she may be the only problem which could cause our actions as Master and Servant having grave consequences,” Kirei replies, meeting affected indifference with some affected amusement. It is a joke of sorts, but Gilgamesh chooses not to humor it so easily. Instead, he chooses to try Kirei's commitment to it a little further.

“We have won, Kirei, and she has conceded the victory,” Gilgamesh says, sighing to the full extent of his patience. “What worry could you possibly harbor in your mind? I thought you had found joy in what you have won. Has it been so short-lived?”

“She tried to kill me,” Kirei points out, more deeply within his low register of voice. “... And you let her,” he adds. He leans back, casually receptive in his posture before his arms start to fold to form a barrier across his chest.

“Did I? You seem to still be alive,” Gilgamesh returns. Finally, he tires of his position and paces further into the room. He covers ground which is familiar, wandering toward the window because the view is wider, if not much more entertaining.

“I thought you said I seemed to be dead,” Kirei says.

Gilgamesh passes behind the chair, very nearly touching it, making his presence acutely known and then gone again.

“Is it not the same to a man such as you?” he asks, withering and beckoning at once. Then, the nearness of his voice is snatched away again, from the air. He keeps moving without real aim, deprived of dematerialization as an option in this form. He makes do with this new flesh and blood.

He hears Kirei clear his throat. It feels as much like success as could have come from this particular conversation. He notices that his course has almost turned him back around to walk between the chairs, past the low table, and back through the door. He will need to find greater amusements in this place, if he is to wait for Saber to provide her own in due time, as she is bound to.

“Then what could it possibly matter if he is punished for seeing the results of my choices?” Kirei calls when Gilgamesh's back is to him. “He killed me, certainly, but in the end...” he says, trailing off.

Gilgamesh glances back toward him. It occurs to him in the moment that, perhaps, it would be generous of him as a king to grant Kirei some reminder of what debts are owed, of which are settled, and what bond they now share.

“But in the end the same thing that could not bear to consume me has returned your life to you. No others consumed by the fire were quite so blessed with good fortune. I am certain there were others caught in the flame with hearts every bit as wicked and inequitable as yours,” he suggests, his tone choosing justice over passion as he weighs the notion in the balance.

“I owe you my life,” Kirei allows, his tone one granting indulgence.

It satisfies Gilgamesh, for the time being. On a whim, he seats himself in the place Kirei had taken just before he had taken the life of his teacher. For a moment, he focuses simply on the feeling of the muscles in his back relaxing. They do not do so as completely as when he had, in his previous form, enjoyed himself in Kirei's quarters.

“I enjoyed your sofa better,” he remarks in reply.

Shifting forward, he leans toward the table with consideration. His eyes track to the place where he had been standing watch, a little too far off for any respectable guard in fear for his lord's safety. Only, that agreement had been breached by Tokiomi long before he had been fully informed of the charade. False tribute for false obedience and protection – it was simply boring, empty justice. In a fitful moment, he almost envies what Kirei must have felt, sitting in this very place, such a short matter of hours ago when considered here in the quiet of the day. He had seen it, but he wonders what it was to know it.

The feelings of others are the only thing which he cannot simply demand for his own. Every invention humanity has ever produced, the first, the best, the greatest – these have been safely kept in his treasury. But not these things. Not these fleeting emotions which cannot show forth any form which he can hold in his hands and continue to admire.

His fingers reach toward the place where the box had been placed, revealing the ornate and worthily crafted dagger. He certainly has better daggers in his treasury, but that did not make its presence as reprehensible as the dull, ugly knives in the kitchen or the pitiful swords hanging above the mantel.

“Did you keep the thing?” he asks, fingertips drumming against the bare wood once before returning to his knee.

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices Kirei glance up as if he is bothered from deep study of something.

“Yes,” Kirei answers, his tone perfunctory. “It was given to me as an agent of the Tohsaka family, which I am still...” he says. Gilgamesh can very nearly capture the feeling of the delight that must be learning to bubble beneath that serious exterior. He almost feels he could laugh again, but it is not quite enough. Instead, his eyes are drawn and fixed back to the place where the dagger had first been presented.

“Ah, yes,” he allows. “Didn't he mention something about a daughter?” he asks.

“Yes. Rin,” Kirei explains without suspicion in his explanation.

“... Will she meet the same fate as her father?” Gilgamesh asks. He hesitates to ask the question, for an instant, because it is not a suggestion. The girl's death being much the same as her father's would certainly cement the betrayal in the manner of a terrible story told late in the night by a jester when all the guests had tired of laughing and wished to be chilled after too much warmth from their drink. Only, he has not puzzled out which path Kirei might take. It is not as if the young girl yet knows the details of her father's death. His brow furrows, but only towards the teacups.

“She was given into my care as a guardian when Tohsaka Tokiomi died. It was in his will,” Kirei says, drawing out the paper Tokiomi had given to him moments before his death from somewhere. He unfolds it with a flourish of interested movement, as affected as any actor not quite accustomed to his present role. It shines through, just for a moment when the movement catches Gilgamesh's eyes.

“You are a very complicated man, Kirei,” Gilgamesh remarks, but he feels some energy restored to his limbs. He gently pats the back of the sofa, shifting his position so he might recline his legs along its length. It is not so practical as it might be upon Kirei's, but he is prepared to settle for more talk of this newest scheme if there is more to hear.

“It is not very complicated in terms of my intent. It is only complicated in terms of my position,” Kirei insists, mildly, his eyes scanning over the paper dutifully. “I must relay Tohsaka Tokiomi's final wishes to the Mages Association. They will see to the other matters, as my teacher related in your hearing. I remained here because there is further work to do before my duties as Overseer and executor of Tohsaka Tokiomi's will are complete.”

“You are sending me away?” Gilgamesh asks, very nearly complaining. He does not immediately obey, but his abdomen tightens before he is entirely reclined.

Kirei glances up from the paper, his head held low so that he almost has the appearance of bowing while he starts to write without deterrence.

“I am simply dismissing you to your other amusements,” he retorts as Gilgamesh resigns himself back to his feet.

  
  


┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

  
  


It is nearly nightfall before Gilgamesh finds his way back to her door. His indulgence toward Kirei's impatience has been excessive. Surely the man would be finished with his record-keeping by now, but there is a more pressing matter. She is the more pressing matter. Kirei can only provide him with amusements as he finds them for himself. She, on the other hand, is amusement herself.

Finding no more respite in the trifles found in this place, he can wait no longer to see if the night has changed her disposition. He would find it no less pleasing if she had remained as she had been before. She had been coursed through with unsettled blood, the anger clawing for a way out. He had seen it in the way her eyes had longed for every sharp object in sight like water and salvation in the desert.

“Saber,” he says, freshly amused by the description she wears like a name and calling to her. He knocks at her door.

There is no response.

He knocks once more in the same rhythm, then his eyes fall to the handle. If she has locked the door, it would be no trouble to break through it. After a moment's consideration, he reaches down and tries the handle with no strong measure of force. It easily gives way to his hand.

The room nearly dark and held in shadow when he steps through the door. He has never found reason to enter this room in his time in this house, but its contents are not difficult to discern. Such things have changed little since his own time, no matter how the ornamentation has changed. He finds the bed. He anticipates finding her in it, her body reclined and sleeping. What else would there be for her to do in such a place – a room meant for a child – for such a long time?

The bed is empty, undisturbed, but he does not have time or reason to grow alarmed.

There are soft sounds of rustling fabric, the gentle rattle of metal handles attached to wooden chests, and the barely audible sounds of her breathing. More fabric crumples in her hands before he sees the movement of her smoothing it out. She seems to respond to his presence by gripping tighter before hiding the evidence of her gripping.

She sits on her knees, the tight joining of her thighs carefully flattened to give her some surface upon which to balance the things she draws from an open drawer. She is clothed differently than before. It seems almost silly that she would have changed them again, almost unlike her, but the last time he had considered such things it had nearly cost him his head. He has no fear of that happening again, but he spots her abandoned clothing, folded neatly upon the desk beside the bed.

What she wears now covers her much more loosely and completely. Had she knelt in such a way clothed in the other skirt, he imagines it might have tested its worth as a covering for her legs at all. He can imagine that with such rigidity in her legs, that it would not have mattered, but as his eyes rest upon her he can imagine her thighs, higher up than he has seen, pressed together in impenetrable chastity. He smiles, easily, trying not to laugh. He could not imagine what life, what country, what world would have produced such a creature, if only he did not know it so well already.

The white gown has fallen easily over her body, tucked around her legs so well that he can only see the pads of her toes and the flat part of one foot, leading into the curve of its arch. She seems smaller in the white garment – so white that it seems to glow and make her skin appear more pink than pale. On the underside of her forearms, he can see the crisscrossed lines of blue – her veins – like cold moonlight drawn out by the light garment. He imagines that beneath it, her skin must be cool to the touch.

He stands over her, between her and the bed, for some time. She shifts her posture a few times, not quite squirming. She goes about the task she has set before herself, never looking up at him.

The higher of two drawers is opened up to her. Her small stature makes it so she must rise a little on her knees to clearly see over the top of it, making the furniture seem quite impractical for a child to use. She draws several items from the drawer, slowly, one by one. Each time a small, well-sewn garment spreads out in her hands, she practices neatly folding it back into its original shape, creating an even stack at his feet. The stack resembles the arrangement they must have taken in the drawer. If it were not for the keen focus, the clear look in her eyes, it would seem to border on madness.

He has no way to know how long she has been doing this, but she does not seem to have been disturbed by his presence. He waits, but her thumbs just examine the seams that connect sleeves to a dress as if searching for a fault, testing the strength in such a small thing. He wonders if she means to tear it apart, but he cannot imagine her hands doing such a thing to something so small. If there is any sentiment he can assume without ever having borne witness to it, it is that she would be a kind king toward little children. He does not imagine that she would bear anything less – yet another weight she must carry on her slender shoulders. Finally, he has waited long enough to inquire as to what she is thinking.

“I do not believe those will fit you,” he comments, breaking the silence without committing to a particular tone. He is smiling in a way that he could not help but smile with her kneeling at his feet, but he realizes the difference in her submission and her indifference. The latter casts a little dullness over the image, but her lowered, heavy shoulders fit the part perfectly. “If you do not care for your clothes, I am sure that we can ask Kirei to acquire you some more.”

“They belong to a little girl,” she comments. Her tone is decisive but not without an uneasiness in it. He discerns that she has decided not to ask him questions. Her eyes never move to lift from the garment.

“Yes. Tokiomi had a daughter,” he says, answering the question she will not ask.

“What happened to her?” Saber responds, breaking his assessment that she would not ask more quickly than he might have hoped. He wants to draw nearer to her, to see if she will open her eyes and her heart to him a little more with repeated inquiry. There is no better path into her mind than that which she lays herself.

He crouches down, agile, without hesitation. He positions himself with interest toward her. His back is turned to the desk by the bed, its matching chair, but he leans closer to a single crooked knee. His arms drape over it, hands loosely folded, and he leisurely looks at her neatly folded stack of Rin's clothing. His face is a mask of silent thoughtfulness until he allows a sharper intake of breath.

“She lives,” Gilgamesh says. “She was never in this house during the War, and Kirei has every intention of seeing his duties concerning her through to the end.” As punctuation, he reaches out and casually brushes his fingertips over one of the tucked seams. Glancing up at Saber, gaze falling at about the level of her chest, he notices that her gown hardly seems to have any.

The ridges, the ribbing that spread out from each side of the fastened gown seem like her. Rigid – and pointlessly so – but beautiful in their peculiar, hard excess.

He is nearly caught off guard again, this time when she tries to catch his eyes. She assumes them not to be lowered to her body, and he finds that he must lift up his own when she will not lower her gaze to acknowledge the indirectness of his.

“You cannot believe that,” she insists. He wonders why it seems such a bother to her that he listen to Kirei expressing his own interests when it seems that her Master never expressed any of his.

“I do,” Gilgamesh says. “You see, Kirei has no cause to lie to me.”

“Apart from pleasure in lying?”

“I believe he has hardly found any in that,” Gilgamesh retorts with a smile that shows his teeth.

“Have you not tried?” she asks, more and more tightly wound.

“I am fairly certain he would not find true pleasure in it even if I were to offer him every one I know...” Gilgamesh says, taking the opportunity as he trails off to lock his eyes onto hers with continued asking, continued offering.

She will not immediately break eye contact, but she uses all the force of a breath to avert her eyes, finding not the garments around her lap but the pattern in the floor. They are seated upon a rug upon another layer of carpet. The floor is luxurious enough to have been called a bed by some common people of the former world. He wonders if she thinks the same, and the very act of wondering whets greater appetite beneath his tongue.

In her perfect white gown, it is impossible for her to hide the flushed warmth in her face, down her neck. He knows that it is only a matter of time before she will crumble, fall to pieces – toward him and into his hands. It is inevitable and worth savoring while he waits.

When she will not offer him any verbal reply, he decides to ease her burden just a little.

“Kirei's greatest source of pleasure is found in pain,” he says, as mildly as if he had been discussing the rain and the rising water levels outside, from which they are entirely safe.

Her eyes widen and return to him. The alarm quickly gives way to outrage. He can imagine that her anger comes at least in part from hearing something she already knows put into words. That is the kind of person she is.

“You look so surprised,” Gilgamesh teases, “but you knew it to be true. You should understand it better than I do.”

“He is your Master,” she insists, trying to cut off any other suggestion of meaning. She shakes her head, her eyes shifting their focus to some indistinct part of the furniture before her. “I knew he was a murderer. I knew he was evil. I never imagined quite how... wrong it would be.”

“Wrong? To find pleasure in pain?” Gilgamesh asks her, delighting in how familiar the movements of his tongue and mind are, just in this instant.

“Joy in the pain of others,” she says.

“Then you do understand.”

“He wears a priest's garb, but he is worse than an open devil, a monster,” she says, looking back up at him with wide, clear eyes.

He chuckles lightly when he realizes that she is looking to him for an example of the other. He lifts his eyebrows.

“That is what concerns you? The sin of it. You are not as different as you think,” he taunts her.

“Do not dare compare me with that lying thief. He stole lives, this war, _everything_ he holds,” she warns, setting her jaw with an anger he believes, even if he does not fear it.

She looks down from his eyes as if to deprive him of her sight. It does not offend him, but he feels it. She will not even entertain the idea that she might have something in common with this man. He cannot think to blame her. It is her own pain which she seems to love so dearly, after all.

“You believe Kirei to be a dishonest man?” he asks to grant her some respite. “I always thought that most killers were quite honest people. It is hard to take a life and not to mean it.”

“It isn't,” Saber says, shaking her head.

“Are you one to leave unintended victims?”

She pulls the sleeve of the dress a little tighter, flattening the dress even more. It is rich colors of red and green, laced together with black in thick and thin lines. It looks as if it is made for warmth, but it has not been cold here in several days. In the time before the fire, it had been as if the world itself had begun to feel its warmth. Only the rain has brought any cool back to the air with it, but Gilgamesh knows that neither the girl's father nor anyone else could have anticipated that.

“I tried never to sacrifice lives in vain, but I have sacrificed them,” she murmurs, shaking her head.

“Their sacrifices are honored by your people and are for you... if you are their king,” Gilgamesh replies, letting out a breath.

“I am not her king,” she says. “I should never have been anyone's,” she says, her jaw too tight with too much grinding of her teeth. With the way she examines the fabric so closely, he wonders if she realizes she has said it out loud. The words wash over him like something revolting, and he cannot help but snarl a little at the thought.

“You were,” he snaps, far less patient but not very loud. He reaches out, meaning to take the dress from her hands to draw her out of this much less becoming dream.

He manages to touch it, but she pulls it closer to her body. Any differently, and she would have carelessly drawn his hand to her body, too. She looks at him, equal measures of anger and sorrow showing plainly in her eyes. She holds onto the little girl's dress as if it belongs to her as much as any of his treasures belong to him – the dress of a little girl neither of them have ever beheld with their own eyes.

“What are you doing with them?” he asks, rather than moving again.

“I needed to see whose... village I was plundering,” she says, speaking in figures that seem difficult for her to form.

“This is hardly a village, but a palace,” Gilgamesh replies.

“And does it matter? Border village or castle – what have we taken from her? And why?”

She is speaking so freely that it almost alarms him. It hardly sounds like her. He knows what she sounds like, so full of conviction. Not this lost girl, looking at another young girl's clothes. He watches her, waiting. He needs something more from it, but she has left his eyes narrowed, uncertain of what it is.

“I know what it is my duty to my people to correct... Gilgamesh.” She speaks his name as a word she does not know, yet again, but she has committed it to memory. It is different from the knowledge he has of her. It is far less intimate, speaking more to a station than a name. “And I cannot... must not deny them the penance I owe,” she said.

“You owe this girl nothing. She is not your subject,” Gilgamesh tries to convince her, weary already because he knows she is determined for it to be in vain. He sighs, moving to draw up the stack of clothing and place it back in the drawer as he stands.

“And I am to sleep in her bed, when her father has been killed. By you,” she says. The officious tone she takes on fills him with some relief. He straightens the clothing in the drawer, having no reason to do it carelessly. She is small when he stands and she will not move from her place on the floor, but she sounds more like herself again.

“Yes,” he replies, the simplest answer. He closes the drawer, leaving her to do what she likes with the dress she holds like the form of a child she feels indebted to. When she still seems lost, he reaches down to take hold of the back of her arm, above her elbow.

She jerks down on it, pushing the hardness of her bone into the palm of his hand.

“Do not touch me,” she commands him, finally looking up into his eyes with such a distance between them.

His eyes move from hers and toward the bed with dull impatience. Then he reaches down for her arm again, first one, and then the other. He holds them at the same place, lifting in a way that gives her little choice but to rise with him.

“You need to sleep,” he tells her, flat authority in his voice. She releases the dress from her hands to resist his arms, but then she is on her feet and he lets her go without resistance. He gestures toward the bed. “Sleep,” he repeats.

Rising to her full height, looking up at him, she glares. Even the edges of her glare look weakened and tired.

“Whether I can destroy you or not does not mean I will not hurt you,” she growls at him.

“And when you have slept, we can do battle until your heart is content,” Gilgamesh replies magnanimously, with a nod. He reaches up, touching her at her shoulder and guiding her toward the bed. She shrugs him off but without another threat. Instead, she stands obstinately before him, her eyes still as focused as she can manage. He can see the exhaustion in her, and he can feel it beginning to creep into his own perception.

“What I yielded to you was your life! Nothing more,” she declares, quite loudly.

“And there will be time for you to give me the right answer about what you wish your life to be,” he insists, kindly, only barely widening his eyes. “But for now, you need to sleep. Put away these thoughts of this girl and her clothing. She will live, and she will return to this place in time, and then you can show her every kindness you believe you owe her.”

He notices Saber blink a few times. She glances at the bed for a moment. She steps back from him before she speaks.

“Why should you order me to sleep?” she asks, measured and calm.

“Do you understand what you are now? What we are,” Gilgamesh replies, sighing. He turns away from her voluntarily to walk past her, but he slowly moves back around toward the bedpost closest to him at the end of the bed. “If we were anything else, perhaps we could avoid sleep forever. As we are, we cannot. I once tried.”

Saber must turn around to look at him then. She does so, slowly, glancing back over her shoulder before she turns her body. She is smart enough to know when she is being led, even when he does not touch her. He sees her lips start to move, but then she presses them together along with a furrow in her brow.

“ _We_ have no need of sleep here. I can sleep on my own,” she says. “Leave me,” she orders, moving toward the bed in a decisive movement, to sit upon it. She stays upright, one leg bent beneath her generous nightgown. He can only see the jut of her knee pressing against it as the other foot does not quite relinquish its contact with the floor. She looks at him, negotiating. He smiles a little as he sees her spirit return, settling within her.

“I only meant to see you safely off to sleep,” he counters mildly.

“There is no need.”

He nods toward her crooked thigh, just to have occasion to draw attention to the way her legs are parted, however discreetly.

“Your leg has healed quite well,” he remarks pleasantly. There is no deception at all in his tone. It would have been a shame if her defiance had caused her a painful infection. He can only imagine how much worse her temperament might have been. “I thought that the medicines collected in my treasury might help you,” he admits. She is already moving, noticing the calm searching of his eyes.

Soon, both of her legs are drawn onto the bed. She touches her ankles together in his sight, her knees following their example as she holds the gown tight beneath them. She shields her body without a glare, but not without some defiance in her eyes. When she has folded herself, knees drawing in unison toward her chest, she glances down toward where she has hidden any remnant of a scar.

“They did not,” she tells him.

His hand presses against the bedpost, ready to push himself off and leave her for now. Now that she is in the bed, he is certain she will obey him and rest. There will certainly be very little to entertain him if she is so defiant over such simple things.

“Then you are quite more accustomed to pain than I have yet believed...” he says, his attention altering his course a little – causing him to linger in her room and in her eyes.

“I do not know what healed me, but I did not touch your medicine. I had no reason to believe it was medicine and not poison,” she tells him.

He realizes it is a taunt, but as his hand grips around the bedpost, he glances down at her lips. There is no smile upon them, but he has heard something in her tone that he believes he has longed to hear. There is some small break in her voice, almost like humor, hidden in the way she boasts of her pride against him.

He lifts one foot beyond her line of sight, touching his toes back down to the floor. He considers her, his lips taking a gracious and wry turn.

“Then I marvel at your survival yet again,” he taunts her in return.

She looks down, the embrace of her own knees becoming no less solid.

“Go to sleep,” he reminds her. “Rise in the morning and let Kirei feed you again,” he explains, much the same as what he intends to do, however much he doubts that he will enjoy sleeping.

“And hope for poison?” she asks, surprising him with the continuation of the same tone with no glimpse of her eyes.

“If you like, but the hope is in vain. If he knows you wish for poison, I believe he will not give it to you,” he says, indulging the question. Then he turns to go to the door, opening it and lingering beneath the frame. “Do not worry about this, Saber,” he advises her, earnestly. “No harm will come from sleeping in this bed until you wish to find another. I am sure the child was sleeping long ago.” He turns away from her, drawing the door behind. “Your compassion must have been the death of you,” he adds, drolly.

“No,” he hears, making him glance backward before he closes the door completely. “It was not,” she says, decisively. As he closes the door, he hears her voice turn away.

  
  


┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

  
  


The rain ceases before Kirei's preparations in Tokiomi's office do. He spends each day seeing to the matters Gilgamesh requests and the matters pertaining to his own survival. The foods he prepares seem to run along a theme, spicy and tingling until they numb the mouth. The particular dish he favors is the same as the first he had prepared for Saber to share, and all the while he seems entirely engaged with personal indulgence. Each day, this self-indulgence culminates in his return to the room where Tohsaka Tokiomi had died.

One morning when the sun is shining out over stagnant pools of water that the earth has not yet managed to drink, that the sun has not yet managed to burn away, Kirei vanishes into his solitude a bit earlier than usual. Driven from annoyance to curiosity, Gilgamesh follows him back to the second floor. Standing outside the door, he hears murmuring voices. While it has not been entirely unlike Kirei in these last days to invite certain persons, each in different uniform styles of dress, into the house – without any need to give the order that Gilgamesh and Saber stay out of sight – he has never been quite so brazen as to invite them into Tokiomi's office.

If he has taken this much upon himself, Gilgamesh supposes that it must be within Kirei's preparations to explain his presence. After all, nothing of any interest to him has happened in days. He pushes his way into the office – only to find Kotomine Kirei alone.

He is alone, sitting – as he has each day – at Tokiomi's desk. The voices in the room are clearer, less a murmur and all the more unpleasant when their origin becomes apparent. There is a metal, black and silver, malformed box sitting at an angle atop Tokiomi's desk. He recognizes what it is, both its purpose and how much Tokiomi would have despised such a thing. He cannot help the low chuckle that rises from his chest as he enters the room. He cannot imagine that this is anything but a continued celebration of defiance, and at this point it seems like a childish, happy game.

“Gilgamesh,” Kirei says with familiarity that only confirms this feeling. A gesture beckons him further inside.

“When did you acquire such an ugly thing?” he asks, bluntly.

“If I am going to play a butler for your present needs, I needed equipment that would allow for better oversight away from the church,” Kirei explains, almost tutting as he looks at Gilgamesh.

“I thought the participants in your pitiful war used magic to achieve such ends,” Gilgamesh says, finding a seat to perch himself upon, facing toward Kirei.

“Tokiomi loved such nonsense, but there are some ends it is pointless to use magecraft to achieve. Needless, arrogant complication.”

“I believe that is a sort of blasphemy,” Gilgamesh mocks.

“A sort of blasphemy, yes,” Kirei agrees, catching onto the playful lilt of it. His eyes track back to the screen which occasionally casts strange motes of light onto his face, even in the well-lit room.

“You mentioned the oversight of your duties,” Gilgamesh says, getting to the purpose of his visit.

“As I inherited my father's position as Overseer, yes,” Kirei jokes, evasively.

“The war for the Holy Grail is finished,” Gilgamesh reminds him. “I can only assume this means the matters still pertaining to Tokiomi's death?”

“Is there something in particular that concerns you, Gilgamesh?” Kirei asks, pleasant while looking upon Gilgamesh with a certain impatience.

“I note that we are alone here,” Gilgamesh says, giving him an opportunity to rise to the topic on his own. He does not know how long it has been pressing on his mind as anything to talk about. He wonders if it was from that first night in the house, the night he had found Saber sitting on her bedroom floor.

“Do not tell me you are worried about Rin?” Kirei asks, laughing from deep in his chest – unable to stop himself again, it seems.

“Do not mock me, Kirei,” Gilgamesh chides him easily. “Where is she? She is not here, and Saber occupies her bed.”

“I had not imagined we would need more than one when you brought her home with you,” Kirei says, pausing for just a moment. Gilgamesh waits for further report without changing posture or expression. “If you are so concerned not to unsettle your darling bride, then I am sure there is a cot somewhere in this house suitable for a young girl. For now, her mother's parents care for her until I can set her father's affairs in order.”

Gilgamesh does not question Kirei. He notes the smile on his face, meeting it with a crooked turn of his lips that could not quite be said to be returning it. His fingers find his shirt and casually smooth out the hem.

“I shall leave your business to you, Overseer,” he remarks, flippantly. “Who knows? Perhaps Saber will one day have her fill of sleeping,” he remarks, but he is already leaving the bright, sepulchral office.

The hallway seems quite long, stretching out to provide any number of empty choices. None of the windows provide a view any more interesting than the next. None of the doors hide anything new, and the notion that it is an honor to be granted user of his previous Master's bedchamber has lost its savor entirely. Retracing his usual steps, before he can even turn from the path the rug provides, he notices that the door which is almost always closed is standing open.

“Sooner than I had hoped,” he says to himself, to her, imagining where he might find her now.

 


	6. Enemy Camp

If there is a rhythm to the days that follow the first, Artoria can barely feel it. She becomes hungry, and she eats. She bathes several times. She alternates between clothing, morning and night, though she starts to favor the night dress for longer stretches of time. In it, his eyes cannot move so easily across her skin. She will not let him see how she avoids it, though. Instead, she tries to stay away from his eyes.

She wanders through the house in silence, keeping to herself most of the time. She learns the contents of each room, at least through stepping into the door frame and seeing what she can see. Walking through this tomb without any acquaintance with the family which was ruined here is a heavy, cold task to carry out.

She finds the room with the largest bed in the house. She notices that its bedclothes are disturbed, faintly wrinkled as if they have been tossed back in place by agile but hurried hands. She quietly enters the room, careful as if there might have still been someone sleeping there she did not wish to wake. Her bare feet move across a rug that is fine, perfect, and clean.

The room is furnished with dark wood, all of it elegant in its age. The shining mirror set into the door of a wardrobe shines brighter than the glint of any blade or armor, set off by its dark frame. Artoria catches a glimpse of her reflection and wonders that it is much the same as the last time she remembers seeing herself. She has tied her hair back in place, but there is little else she can do but wear the uniform granted to her by the new master of his house, who would seem to be Kotomine Kirei, after all.

Struck by a sudden thought, her gaze moves past her own reflection. Looking up to the top of the wardrobe, she studies its height, ending somewhere above her head. Her eyes fall back down to the metal handles, little rings dangling from the mouths of some beautiful, small creatures. She loops her fingers in one, then the other. She tugs at one, then the other. The doors give way to her hands and open before her on gliding hinges.

Inside, she smells flowers and parchment, or something like them which seems altogether too perfect to be real. Her eyes flit over jewels, some of them displaying some representation of time passing, ticking away, while others shine only in their beauty. These are placed in small boxes, layered but easy to draw out and to see. To the other side, there are hanging garments of every warm, vivid shade of sunset, devoid of any dreary shade apart from a few garments of pure black and exactly one the color of some stormy sky. Every other garment is pure white, the color of flowers, life, or some other beautiful thing which has faded away from the lady she knows will never look upon her fine things with such appreciation again. As if in penance, her fingers reach out, and draw up the delicate chain of a necklace. It glints cold, white light back at her, and she replaces it, trying to find its exact position again but not finding it.

And this is how she has left everything.

  
  


┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

  
  


She learns from listening, from ticking clocks, and from careful watching when she is least likely to run into either of the house's other two occupants. She wonders if any of them will ever leave this place again and if all of them will do it alive. She tries not to speak to them, not to look at them, and especially not to find herself alone with the man called Gilgamesh.

The attention to this latter detail places her in the courtyard one afternoon. The sky has cleared the heavy cloud cover which had hung over the city for days. She notes that she cannot remember when the sky had begun to appear blue again. She folds her arms against her body, holding in warmth as the air seems to have remembered that it is winter here, after the unseasonable heat had leaked out with the wicked flames. The light, almost winged shirt Kotomine Kirei had provided for her does little to keep out the cold, and her legs are exposed from the midpoint of her thigh. Her little brown shoes scuff against the paved ground.

The world around her seems to hum with a light pressure drumming inside her ears, like the faint, noticeable lack-of-sound that comes with being underwater – only, the air is clear. Through this clear air, a breeze blows and circles around her, whipping a strand of yellow hair from its tie toward her face. She reaches up for her face, drawing it away from sticking to her breath-dried lips. For an instant, the emptiness of the world seems almost unnatural, almost spectral, like the haunting atmosphere of a battlefield before the first drop of blood is shed – a battlefield which smells of... sweet grain and remote, exotic spice that tingles her nose.

Her eyes are drawn sharply upward. Her gaze narrows, tightens, and tracks the single movement that comes, unexpected, out into the clear, empty light of day. She squints at him, not quite like the harsh glare of the sun, but it reminds her of a similar, stubborn resistance to pain, to the instinctive desire to look away. She cannot look away from him, though, and it seems almost suspicious that he has emerged so simply from the nearest door. When her gaze does break away for an instant, she glances up at the high roof of the elegant, palatial house, as if she thinks that is how he ought to enter this arena – _Archer_.

Lowering her gaze back down enough to find his vivid, red eyes, their unnatural slits faintly contracted against the light of day, she notes that he has gained on her a bit more than she had expected – silent, deceptively unassuming, like a snake. The thought has never come quite so clearly before and the fancy momentarily makes her consider the difference between them as she steps out of his reach, turning to circle slowly, finding a way to angle her own back toward the door and his away from it in the expanse of the courtyard. The dragon in her soul, the lion in her heart – and if he is a snake, how she might crush him beneath her heel. Only, this fancy does her no good, and the movement to evade him is not quite so fluid as she imagines. They falter at some point on their revolution, and she cannot find the fault to determine why.

“What do you want, Archer?” she demands, words as barbed as any weapon, when she feels herself in need of one.

“And I thought we were past all that—” the man called Gilgamesh intones, quite smoothly. His hands dip down into the pockets of a coat which keep him quite a bit warmer than anything she has been provided. For a moment, she wonders where he might have gotten it, but distractions of this nature can be quickly pushed aside to make sure she survives. Only, as usual, he stubbornly refuses to adhere to any familiar structure of battle. She notices the slight articulation of his fingers in the pockets, just as he runs upon what seems to be an unexpected problem at the tip of his own tongue – “—Saber.”

The next breath that fills up her lungs feels lighter than the last, almost exhilarating, and she can feel a smirk that is more warning growl than smile pull her lips just above her teeth, lasting only an instant. Her blood pumps faster, making her feel that she might evade him with her pride intact, after all.

“We have passed nothing together, _Archer_ ,” she says, relishing in the impersonal address when he trips on the same.

“We both know those things have fallen away,” he argues.

“Half the power of a title is one's taking hold of it,” she replies, more casually.

His eyes flit toward the sky for a moment, derisive, before meeting hers again.

“If you believe whether someone calls you a king or not is what makes you a king—” he says, but then he chooses to cut his own sentence short as if it hardly bares the expenditure of his breath. He holds it for a moment, then releases it with a teeth-baring smile of his own. “You know my name,” he reminds her.

“And if I choose not to use it—?” she prompts, challenging him. Finally, her back is to the house, and she can retreat inside when she chooses. For a moment, she lingers, not wanting to back down after issuing her retort.

“Surely there are more reasons for us, King of Knights, to use those titles which belong to us than those given to us by this silly game... from which we are now _free_ ,” Gilgamesh says. He steps toward her. He reaches for the strand of hair that has fallen from her loosened tie, and it is only then that she ducks away. She turns from him, back to him, open to attack, but she finds the door without looking back.

  
  


┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

  
  


The question of dignity fades from its central importance in her mind when she is back inside the house. Without finding any of the switches or chains which will summon up the artificial, electric light in the Tohsaka home, Artoria finds that her eyes can scarcely see ahead of her for a moment when she closes the door behind her. She knows her way forward without waiting for adjustment and flees for the stairs, where she will find the row of windows and sunlight filtered by clear, clean panes of glass.

In her chest, the knot of her heart beats with a noticeable thump against her ribs, but she feels no burn of exertion in her limbs or her lungs. Her feet carry her back to the door of the little girl's bedchamber, but she stops in front of the closed portal into a bedchamber which is not hers at all. She reaches out, tapping fingertips against the metal handle. She does not turn it and instead finds her way down the hallway to the bloodied, stolen office. Its door is cracked, brazen and silent. She presses against it, finding no trace of the corrupted priest. She notes the way the room has changed since the last time she had seen it, the things which have been added, but very few seem to have been taken away.

Step by step, she passes over the rug which shows no trace of murder. She moves to the desk, walking around it with eyes seeking, searching, for anything that might satisfy the sudden, insistent restlessness that has taken hold of her. She feels that she has been sleeping for days, for weeks, and that she must only now wake from dreaming. Papers and books and writing utensils, cup stains, reddened napkins, and other traces of Kotomine's presence litter the space, but she manages to swallow revulsion which would have sometime led her to rage since this strange venture had kept her from her rightful place.

Instead, she is calm as she tries her eyes at the unfamiliar script which she has been provided a mysterious grasp of from the strange mechanism which delivered her to this place and has failed to take her back. She notes its foreignness more than she has in the past, but with a few blinks and some patience, she recalls how to read it from the many other thoughts which have been scattered in her mind like foreign spices, unfamiliar but which combine with her more familiar thoughts without much resistance.

While she can read the script she finds, printed by hand and by machine, she makes little sense of what she finds. Rather than talk of magecraft, as she might have expected to find in this office, or talk of managing such an immense house's maintenance and affairs, she finds correspondence which seems labeled for receipt and departure both within this country and far outside its borders. There are things about this world which she does not have anything but the faintest whisper of a grasp of what they mean – names with no shape, maps with no key, and she believes the King of Conquerors might have had an easier time deciphering what she loses herself to shuffling through. Unfortunately, he had not been the one of the Kings she had been left with, she thinks with a grimace.

Time has little consequence as she gives herself to the first real attempt at finding any source of power, of explanation, of anything but captivity in this plush dungeon. She has no idea where the sun might have passed to in the sky by the time she hears the too-regular, foreboding creaking of the house which indicates that one of them approaches. She has been so absorbed that she thinks not which one it might be, not what she might do, except leave. Her heart quickens again, and with a furtive attempt to straighten the stack of papers which she had been carefully thumbing through, she leaves the office behind as intact as she can. She feels that it is the scene of another crime now, but she feels no guilt for whom she has perpetrated it against, and she has yet to know the meaning of her transgression.

She still does not return to Tohsaka Rin's chambers which she has taken from her, so unscrupulously and so without any notion as to how to make it right. Instead, she finds the largest bedchamber, which she has given a wide berth since her first entrance into it. This time, she moves with purpose, and some sense of familiarity.

She has pulled the fluttering blouse over her head and dropped it down by the time she reaches the door of the wardrobe, briefly catching sight of the second undergarment which she finds she hardly needs except for some added sense of armor which she has been denied here. She opens the wardrobe and she pushes the skirt past her hips, letting it fall to the floor. She kicks it aside, toward its matching piece. She never removes her shoes as she pulls out a garment that is the color of faintest green – springtime buds, the unreal reflection of plants in sunny water. It is also a woman's dress, but it hangs looser and longer – even a little longer than intended, made for a taller woman – on her legs. She straightens the garment with haste, closing the wardrobe and using the mirror less for vanity and more for trying to appear inconspicuous. She does not want to draw unnecessary attention from anyone in this place called Fuyuki – for their own safety, if nothing else, she reminds herself.

The dress hangs well at her shoulders, but its length and flowing fabric make her petite frame look even smaller. With her hair tied back, she has none of the elegance she had exuded in the clothing Irisviel had once chosen for her. Instead, it makes her jaw look harsh, plain, and without considering it for very long, she unties her hair. Quick, unpracticed fingers try to find their way through the strands, placing them in a somewhat more passively pleasing shape, but she feels no satisfaction apart from the assurance of safety when she is – by some manner of thought – satisfied with her efforts.

She leaves the room behind without the sole purpose of reaching the stairs without allowing herself to be stopped. She considers for a moment, and she stops herself from taking the usual, most open, invited path. Instead, she considers her quiet, plodding exploration of the house and recalls the less-sturdy, more dusty, hidden-away stairs which are hidden opposite the elegant stair, hidden on each floor by doors. She takes the servants' stair, and looks left and right when she emerges from the dark, cobwebbed door, to a silent main floor, somewhere near the kitchen. Glancing backward, the door looks like any other pantry.

Orienting herself, she thinks back to that first day – to the fire, the fever, and the rain. She tries to remember the orientation of the road, the angle of the sun, the smell of the river caught on the wind. She satisfies herself that she should exit the house opposite the courtyard and finds her way to do this, as stealthy as she knows how to be when she would much rather have stolen away on a healthy, hearty, and thundering horse.

She has made her way to the smooth, even, uniform path which leads alongside this house and the others which lie beyond the boundaries of its grounds when she realizes that she has not made a clean escape. He is there, following her like a spirit, like the bitter fog of some disease. She glances back at him, meets his eyes, and he stops in place. His golden, faintly darker than his hair, burnished brows lift up his forehead a bit. She glowers at him in reply. Her hands form small fists, but without intent, and she lets them go. She notices that there are others out on this path, and she has no intention of laying such destruction upon this unsuspecting street as they had done to so many places – too many places – in the War just past.

She turns away from him instead and begins walking.

Footsteps, heavier and patiently regular, follow her.

She is already in the strange round of a path, far out of sight of the house which has been her prison, when she can bear his scrutiny no more. She looks left and right once more. They seem to be alone here. All at once, she rounds on him.

“I have no intention of leading you to some place where we might bring more ruin upon these people!” she snaps at him, emphatic but not quite loud, a subdued sort of command.

“You look like a flower,” he replies – _non sequitur_. She blinks.

The huffing breath which follows is the only way she allows herself to bristle, to show her offense. She is almost weary of it by now.

“I had no intention of _bringing ruin_ to anyone. I thought you meant to go on some journey,” he adds, when she does not say anything.

“It is not a _journey—_ ” she snaps, finding some _need_ to disagree.

“If not a journey, some means of escape?” he asks, the _faintest_ edge of accusation in his tone.

“No,” she says firmly, honestly, because she had made and had found no such plans.

“What then?” he asks, and it seems like such a genuine question that she finds herself answering, regardless of the person asking it.

“I intend to see what remains of this city now that the War has passed and the fires have gone out,” she says.

Gilgamesh blinks visibly a few times. He looks to the head of the path where they will soon pass if they continue. He nods ahead.

“If you would like,” he says, just like that including himself in her quest whether she has invited him or not.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I wrote the last chapter, it was my sincerest hope to close my update window from once a month to... somewhat more frequently than that. Many months later, I am sad to say that did not happen. It has been a difficult season for me but also one filled with at least a few interesting, very busy, and fairly positive changes. This update is somewhat shorter, I think, than previous ones, but I think that it adequately gets us back into the swing of things so that this story does not join the WIP graveyard. Thank you to all past-commentators and to my current **17** subscribers and all those many, many users and guests who have given me kudos, even in my unplanned hiatus! 
> 
> Feedback is my lifeblood, so it's appreciated. As always, I hope you enjoy reading.


	7. The Shore

 

Following after Saber is something to which Gilgamesh cannot quite grow accustomed. He has relied upon guides before, in the far distant past, but they have served their purpose and been dispatched in one way or another. In this case, rather than being led to a final point at which he will find something and they will part ways, he is an observer to another's journey for something he does not yet understand.

She is purposeful and graceful in her stride, perhaps accentuated by the small span of each of her limbs and her body's form from head to base of spine. When he glances down to see her at his side, he is mostly met with a look at the top of her head where golden hair falls simply wherever it wills, straight with the occasional bent of will. Her jaw stays firmly set, her bearing never higher nor lower than her frame as if there has never been any person with one greater. He smirks to himself at the deliberateness of it which might pass for the confidence he had once seen and had then seen start to crack.

When they emerge from the lonely curve where Saber had seen fit to break her silence, he follows her whim and each hard, narrowed focus of her eyes. The sudden presence of people walking along the carved out paths that seem designated for those who travel on foot is something he notes without real alarm. He had mingled paths with these people for the first several nights of his service to Tokiomi for lack of anything better to do.

He steps close enough that the sleeve of his jacket brushes against Saber's arm. She glances up at him, a practical look of being affronted etching her face.

“I can tell you what these people consider amusement,” he offers when he meets her eyes. “Show you those which are the least wearisome.”

He can understand how she might wish to engage with some form of life, however plain, after her ordeal.

No sooner than he has finished with his suit, however, she snatches her eyes away again, fixing them on the narrow path ahead. He does not understand why, as they continue onward, it seems that the wider and wider path is reserved for loud, four-wheeled machines that seem often indistinguishable, one from the next. He understands these carriages which require no horse or other beast to guide them, but they simply smell and, at times, hardly seem to move faster than the other pedestrians' feet carry them. Boring excess in insistence. He sighs, at this and at Saber's stubbornness.

“I told you why I undertook this journey,” she says, forcefully enough that her voice carries up to him without real effort.

Gilgamesh lifts one hand and gestures to a building that reaches up to the sky, then to a plaza with people milling about, trading and eating.

“The city remains. There are even children. I don't see many of them crying. What more do you want?” he asks, trying to hurry her along through this process. It would be difficult for him to explain to a spirit so insistent as hers that her pursuit is pointless, whatever the outcome.

“This city is larger than what we see here,” Saber reminds him.

“Then is it truly a city? If its bounds are so great that one part cannot feel the woe of another, it seems impractical that one might rule or protect it,” Gilgamesh comments, if only to carry on a conversation. He does not know which of these ordinary people or which of these vulgar buildings he should look to in order to find which person presumes to be king, now that his opponents have become even more boring and greater in number. He had not considered dealing with all of them directly. Who would bother? It would be like trying to stamp out every ant radiating from its hill, and he could hardly see a greater judgment forthcoming than the one he had seen rain down days before. These people had, for some reason, survived.

“This era is different,” is Saber's only response.

“That is true,” Gilgamesh allows, seeking out anything. “No king is a king when his subjects are too many to manage and care for.”

“And how would you care for them?” Saber asks, glancing at him only long enough to show the way her nose crinkles a bit with distaste as if his answer, unspoken, is already odious to her.

The fact that she makes him feel a certain weariness without it giving way to anger and wrath is itself worth patience. It is something few people have ever managed, and the fact that she is not one who proposes to advise him and can still incite such a response is stranger still. He cannot tell what her purpose is when she questions him, but if it is to disprove his worth through empty questioning, he will find some satisfaction from disappointing her.

“The purpose of a city is to provide protection for those who live in it,” he explains, as if he is instructing a child – as he had once instructed a child, in fact. “Those who live in the city choose to obey its ruler in order to continue to be allowed the use of that city's services and protections. Is there anything about that with which you would disagree?”

“I was not only responsible for those within the walls of Camelot. There were those in the outlying areas to which I... owed protection too,” she replies, and he wonders a bit at her hesitation. He wonders if this is yet another thing she feels guilty for.

“You cannot protect from lawlessness outside the reasonable governance of law.”

“And where is that?”

“For me, it is this world. For you, the walls of Camelot,” Gilgamesh provided happily. He does not quite know why this, of all statements, staggers Saber's step. She stops, turns to her side to face him, just beside a public bench. “Yes?” he asks when they pause along their route. “Have I spoken something which you believe to be untrue?”

“Who... Who do you think you are?” Saber asks, but then she glances all the way down to his feet and back up again to his eyes, new fervor in hers. “I know who – _what_ – you think you are, and I have met many like you. And most of them fell to their own pride and to someone close enough to cut their bared throats when they peeled away their gaudy covering.”

Gilgamesh takes in the look in her eyes. It is fire and has some glint of the sun in it, piercing through the color of sky. He only barely sees it, and he wishes to examine it better. Undeterred from previous failure, he reaches for her jaw again, ready to hold it so her chin will not lower her eyes from his sight. She knocks at his wrist, hitting hard enough that it might bruise a lesser man. He catches a laugh in his breath, conceding again if only to watch her puff up like a territorial bird. Rather than lowering his hand, he gestures to the row of buildings that stretch beyond and tower above them.

“If you are thinking of usurping me,” he says, “I am afraid you will have to wait for your audience. I am _captive_ to your amusement, Saber, but... the world has already flaunted defiance to any worthy kind of order and rule while I have been away. That is the trouble with being dead,” he says. Then he drops his wrist at his side and gestures with a directional nod of his head. “Let us continue to seek out your morbid fascination,” he says, because that is all it can be.

  
  


┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

  
  


The fact that it would have been tiresome, if not nearly untenable, to count the faces they pass along the way to the river bothers Gilgamesh. He recalls that night, the smoke and wicked fire and the rain. He knows that boring drone the magic with which the mud had been imbued had, its spirit of vengeance and dreary responsibility it prided itself on being unable to bear. It had been such a silly existence, brought about by a very silly class of person or god he was sure, but he could not help recalling its repeated words. He cannot help but think that it would be disappointed with the number of thieves, liars, adulterers, abusers, and killers it might have found over just a simple boundary of water. Some army it had raised for itself, indeed.

Life, for these people, is too easy. Therefore, it is without value. Easy to gain, easy to keep, and easy to throw away. He might have commented on this, but by the time he has bored with his own thoughts on the matter, they are coming near to the gradual incline up to a bridge. He smells the scent of water, impurity and something clean tied together in an intimate union that pricks his nose.

Coming closer still, he sees that they are coming upon a barrier and a blockade. Individuals in uniforms that match – little round hats and shades of blue – stroll backward and forward with those wheeled carriages called cars stilled at hazardous angles, presumably to prevent passage. Then there are hard, shaped, stone barriers as well. Added to this, there is a garish, unnaturally yellow tape tethered across the bridge. All in all, it makes it very clear that these people do not wish for anyone to pass.

“It would seem—” he says, ready to mark on the futility of this journey and their options. Only, he finds that the spot beside him the little King of Knights had recently occupied is vacant. A quick refocusing of his eyes shows that she as begun a trek ahead of him, small frame seeming to suck the air in at some unnatural rate to make resistance to her little balled fists and quick feet impossible. She is speaking to one of the uniformed men before Gilgamesh has managed to catch up, not having changed his pace at all. His hands tuck into his pockets as he approaches them, curious but not unduly.

“I must pass,” she is insisting with a strong gesture out toward the bridge.

“It is not safe, and civilians must not pass,” the officer says, and it is clear that he has practiced this line before. Gilgamesh approaches Saber's shoulder and reaches out for it from behind her. When he reaches it, the officer gives her a glance from head to foot. “Especially not _tourists_ ,” he says with some distaste.

Gilgamesh cannot tell whether it is the man's words or his own touch that turns Saber's tendons into stone. She seems to barely be capable of turning to glance up at him without turning her entire body around. She barely meets his eyes before choosing not to jerk away from him, instead focusing the tense energy on the officer.

“You must allow me to pass. It is important that I see the damage... for myself,” she says, solemn and patient – much too patient for a king, but it is as if she has forgotten that this man does not and probably cannot recognize her for what she is.

“I already told you, and if you keep asking I will need to have someone escort you away.” There seems to be a greater underlying threat, but it is a boring impossibility that anyone could actually threaten her.

“Shall I—?” Gilgamesh begins to ask her.

Then she rolls her shoulders back hard enough to push his hand back a little, making him feel the jut of a bone.

“No,” she says, and then she marches back the way she came with no visible loss of dignity. He does not know where she is going, but he follows closer behind.

“You know that he could easily be cast into the river with a determined blow from anything you found lying around,” Gilgamesh comments.

“I know,” Saber says, as if she is hearing him but not really hearing him. He hates that tone, both for his own dignity's sake and because she is capable of using it at all.

“If you are so determined that you _must see—_ ”

“It is against their rule of law here, and I will not try them.”

“Is that how you became a king?”

“I became a king much by accident,” Saber says, shrugging again, less tensely, before she makes an abrupt turn in their route to lead them down beneath the shelter of the bridge, still on the same side of the river. She seems to be seeking some allowed access to the waterfront, and Gilgamesh follows her, once touching her arm to steer her from a distracted collision with a passerby carrying an infant.

“I'm sorry,” Saber says to the young mother, and she seems much too sorrowful for a chance meeting that would be impossible not to make with this many people. At least those particular people hadn't seemed especially odious or disrespectful.

“You should keep your head up,” Gilgamesh says. “You are quite small in frame to be so powerful.”

“I know,” Saber says, refusing to take offense or still so distracted that she cannot.

Gilgamesh makes a soft grumble in his throat, not quite sure how to rectify what is so wrong with her demeanor. She ought to have been more willing to fight him or more willing to comply – one or the other. The middle ground between the two is difficult to navigate, miry, and unpleasant.

“Do you intend to _swim_?” he asks, indignantly.

“No,” she answers simply.

“Powerlessness from you is a _lie_ , Saber,” Gilgamesh says suddenly, loudly enough to call attention to his voice, not only from her but by other people who don't matter at all to him. She looks at him, the look in her eyes cool and calculating. He knows that she still thinks him ready to reduce the street around them to rubble at a whim. For a moment, he is glad she believes it. “Stop for a moment and consider your demeanor, consider these people, and stop pretending you belong among them, held by laws that govern cattle,” he says, just a little more controlled because he has her attention.

“Hold your tongue,” she orders him, light brows tightening down over her eyes. “I do not care if I could conquer them. I do not want to. I do not understand their laws, nor do I need to. I need to see what these people see. Then I may know what it is I need to do. Not until. You invited yourself to follow me, and I warn you... if you try to bring harm to these people, I will stop you, but if you do not wish to commit any crime against them... follow me quietly.”

The last small phrase is spoken in a tone that might have been request and might have been order. It is spoken with some confidence that he likes, at least, but Gilgamesh still cannot quite understand why her insubordinate and stubborn speech only serves to make her more beautiful to him. The worry etched across her brows, above the color of her eyes, suddenly echoes something a bit more beautiful than the sun over this river could ever be. He can afford to indulge her a little longer, at least. He gestures for her to go ahead.

“These people are not worth harming,” he says, as if to fill a role as much as anything else.

  
  


┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈ ┈

  
  


By the time she seems to have found a place to end her restless wandering, the sun has taken on a different disposition in the sky. The rays seem to be a richer color that seems to angrily seek the attention of Gilgamesh's eyes. He is able to withstand it easily, but his gaze narrows even against the shape of his pupil which he imagines may allow some small advantage.

First, Saber had led the way to an overlook where families congregated around machines which took some form of coin to allow easy onlooking. He saw that there were different levels of rungs to allow even children access to these machines. It was quite displeasing to see the way these machines, which seemed to have been built for some other purpose, were being used to circumvent the will of the guards on the bridge. Further that these people brought their children to a place where they may look over a ruined battlefield.

Thankfully, Saber had not seemed to like this place either, and they had moved on from it. After a while, the white, hardened path they had followed most of the way finally met the edge of some grass and other softened, natural ground. The moment she could do so without much obstacle below, Saber touched the cooler ground and Gilgamesh had followed.

She seems much more at ease, padding through grass and down the slope that leads toward the water. First, she redirects their passage toward a treeline which has been undisturbed by the development of all the gaudy, cheap commerce around them. Finally, Gilgamesh feels as if the air he breathes stinks a little less. Saber walks between two trees, her hand briefly bracing on one as if it is familiar. She looks up at it, into its branches and the few, dried leaves that hang on in spite of everything that has transpired here – heat and cold, war and nothing.

Then, she looks ahead and he knows that she sees the water and the little place where no one seems to have touched the shore today. He hears her footfalls, so deliberate that each of them is a distinct sound. She does not fear announcing her presence here, and there is nothing with which she wishes to contend. For a moment, he starts to believe that this is the first time he has seen her not angry, not self-righteous, and not withdrawn into a false, self-created prison. Then, she speaks.

“I wonder if the water is poisoned too,” she says. It sounds as if it is in a tone that is, at the very least, cleansed of any shield she might place between him and the truth. It is as if her thoughts are simply more audible to him than her actions, her breath, her presence often make them.

“It was a crude magic, and I do not believe that these people would notice or care,” Gilgamesh replies, his arms folding into a bar across his chest without predetermined intent. His own shoes scuff against little pieces of rock that glint in the low, red light that shoots out from below the natural, fading glow of the day.

“You have no right to speak of them that way,” Saber scolds him, softly, as if he is a squire of hers.

“I thought I was the victor in our silly battle. I can speak of my subjects as I like,” he jokes without much warmth in his humor.

“You contradict yourself,” she says.

“As do you, always, my love,” Gilgamesh says, warmth enough for laughter creeping into his tone.

Her eyes are the only thing that rebuke him, and even that rebuke seems tired. He is pleased with any sign that her resistance is less impassioned, but he does not quite feel any thrill of pleasure at the concession. Whatever it is, he does not want her resistance to become _bored_ with him. His nose wrinkles a bit, this time not from the quality of the air. His arms stay folded.

Saber exhales through her mouth, audibly, and pushes her hair back from the corner of her lip. She obviously is ill-at-ease with its not being tied at the back of her head. He wonders why she had not tied it, but she seems ready to speak again. He does not interrupt her for fear that he might deprive himself of something more interesting to concern himself with.

“When that night ended, it was not a war over the nation of these people that you won,” she says. She seems strangely reverent, devoid of the wrath and anger that had accompanied her first declarations of his victory. Her gaze drops to the ground beneath her feet and she edges closer, closer to the water until she stops just before wetting her shoes. Then, she levels her chin with the horizon and peers with the longest focus her eyes can muster. For a moment, nothing on this side of the river ought to have existed.

This is something Gilgamesh cannot bear.

“... If you _must_ see it, we could swim. Even in these bodies, we are both greater than they are,” he says. “You would survive.” He reaches her upper arm with his last assertion. He knows that his god's blood makes him something other than what she is, but it is not an insult. There is some quality of hers that makes him resent his own making just a little less, if only because he knows he is a little less unlike her than the people who walk about like vermin somewhere higher along the riverbank.

Once more, she smoothly slides away from him, this time to crouch down where she stands, facing forward still. She could make even kneeling before him seem to hold with it a confident indifference that speaks only of a creature who can and will try its best to rule, however ill-made it is for the weight it takes upon its shoulders. Such a creature cannot be subjected to some measures of rule, simply because it does not understand the limits of its own capacity for striving against – _anything_. She is beautiful when she lowers herself to the ground, and this is one of the reasons why.

She looks up at him, nothing in her gaze speaking of her position. She nods toward the water.

“I mean to stay for a while. We can see the opposite shore from here, and that will allow me to see enough, I think,” she says. There is an incomplete thought there, but he realizes that he is being invited to _sit with her_. With an easy, light shrug of his shoulders he lowers his hand to brace himself to the ground. He leans back against his wrists, trying to settle his eyes on the opposite side of the river and its rise up to a melted down landscape.

The ground his fingers lightly knot themselves in is green.

The ground that rises up from the opposite side of the river is gray like the tired, weaker edges of ash.

There is a treeline behind them. Behind that, buildings.

As the riverbank opposite them manages a feeble incline, it looks like the back of an old man, worn down by years and mortality that had once been strong, higher and straight. There is no sign beyond that a man such as that or any man at all has touched the landscape. Only, there is some sign of it now.

His eyes scan across and pick out several different rectangular and triangular shapes made of a yellow similar to the yellow of the obtrusive, presumptuous tape that the guards had tried to shore up their defenses with upon the bridge.

“They mean to rebuild with that?” he asks. He points to guide Saber's gaze, in case she has not picked out the pinprick marks of these people's refusal to understand their place in the face of what has been rained down upon them. He draws a breath and before he knows it, he laughs, a little freely but not as freely as he could have. Something seems to press against his chest, making it a little harder, a little more tiresome, to laugh at such futility. He glances at her to see if it is something she has done, but her eyes seem fixed on the place he had pointed out.

“They must,” she says simply.

“Must they? I doubt that anyone less than you or I – well, apart from Kirei – survived that night. It is not as if there will be any children without homes,” he says. He glances down at the river water lapping lightly against the shore just beyond the reach of their bodies. The destruction that had occurred that night had been wanton. It had been without mercy and without concern for what would follow. In the dreams held dear to Kirei's heart, there were no survivors. There were few slaves, and those there were did not last very long. Their ultimate service was to provide an entertaining death after a short term of living their lives more and more miserably because of the role Kirei found his way to play. It is a senseless kind of destruction, and it is only the fact that it engenders such love and joy in Kirei's heart that makes it mean anything at all.

“There was... something out there that night,” Saber says, her gaze flitting away from the distant yellow machines. A glance tells him that she had kept looking somewhere out across the water she refuses to try and cross with him as a solitary guide. “... Whatever it is that granted you and me... life,” she says, thoughtfully. She looks away from the ground across the water only to examine her own forearm, left hand coming to grip the right, brushing up and down against the downy hairs that have been burnt across it. “It must be deadly.”

Gilgamesh swallows – real saliva, taking a necessary breath – and sighs.

“And so they try to take with them yellow beasts to fight something older than they have ever known,” he remarks. “Do you know now?” he asks. “What you must do?”

He tries, genuinely, not to make a joke out of the question.

For a time, he thinks that she has lapsed back into defiant silence. He knows she must have heard him, and there is nothing about her that indicates it at all. Then, she nods and bows her head, but not to him.

“I believe I know that the war we fought was not for or against these people. It was for a different kind of person, and the man I foolishly gave my allegiance and service to is not here anymore,” she says.

Saber braces both her hands against the ground, ready to get up, when she looks around at him. She is dusting off the green of her skirt of some stray strands of the green grass. She blocks the bloody light, creating a frame for her body with it. She nods down to the ground at him as she stands over him.

“You're gripping the earth,” she tells him. He does not know why she points this out except that she is right. When he readies himself to follow her again, there is green grass and rich, fertile dirt beneath a few of the white crescents of his fingernails.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the time of publication of this chapter, I have 25 subscribers. Thank you so much to those of you who have cared enough to push that subscribe button and to wait on me to update this story. If you are new here and have reached this point just through clicking and reading through, thank you to you too! 
> 
> A little life update for those of you who have been subscribed: As always, I intend to increase my update interval. However, what ends up happening is that I underestimate the power of the things happening in my life that make it too difficult to keep writing at the pace that I initially wrote this fic at. I really hope that those of you who are interested in the topic will bear with me and keep enjoying it. This time, I finished my fall semester of graduate school, had a sort-of break during which I had to do an online class, and then began my spring semester of graduate school. This semester was my student teaching semester, and the school to which I was assigned was a forty-five minute drive from home. Then, my university was a half an hour in the opposite direction. This meant that I did a LOT of driving, a lot of typing (school stuff), a lot of thinking (about school), and not a lot else. At long last, I made it, and I graduated this May. 
> 
> Once again I have joined the ranks of not-in-school, employment, or training. I am currently looking for a job, and that's always a scary place to be in, but I am optimistic about the KIND of job I will _eventually_ find for myself. In the meantime, I have finally done so much indulgent sleeping that I have started to get the urge to indulge myself in other ways, which includes writing stories about ancient Mesopotamian demigods and ancient British kings having culture clash with the modern world of 1994 and each other. 
> 
> Please take the time to let me know if you liked it. Constructive criticism is always welcome, too.


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